Civil War
by irishais
Summary: In a world run out of patience for witches, certain sacrifices must be made between sorceress and knight. Sequel to Fallen Empires.
1. one

**C I V I L W A R**

_-irishais-_

* * *

_come and conquer and drop your bombs_

_cross my borders and kill the calm_

_bare your fangs and burn my wings_

_I hear bullets singing_

_-_The Cardigans, "You're The Storm"

* * *

_one_

(Click your heels three times, and say, "There's no place like home, there's no place like home, there's no place like home."

Funny how that doesn't work, isn't it?)

The riots are the worst they've been since Rinoa Leonhart's verdict was announced, so bad that even the SeeD team is forced to admit defeat, making a hasty retreat to the relative sanctum of Balamb Garden, leaving Dollet to its own ruin.

Quistis beats him to the shower, her hair and skin caked in dust and ash from a nearly-failed car bomb, and Seifer follows the trail of discarded clothing to the bathroom door. His ribs ache; he wonders if perhaps he's re-fractured something. With a grimace, he pulls his filthy shirt over his head and tosses it on top of Quistis' pants. It'll all end up in the same load of laundry tonight, anyway, washed in gigantic machines with hundreds of other gore-spattered uniforms.

Quistis has the water on full-blast and the shower curtain already closed when he walks into the bathroom, so he takes a moment to examine the damage in the mirror. There's a fresh bruise in the shape of someone's boot right above his waist, which explains a lot of the pain, although he doesn't remember being kicked. Pretty much everything from when those assholes with the honest-to-god torches breached their defensive perimeter onward is a blur.

He's got one more pill in the bottle of heavy-duty stuff Kadowaki prescribed him, and he knocks the pill back, swallowing it with a handful of water from the tap. The empty orange bottle is pitched into the trash can.

"Hey," Quistis says, in mild annoyance, when he pulls back the shower curtain and steps into the narrow stall, but she doesn't throw him out, just resumes scrubbing a massive quantity of shampoo into her hair, a process that will take her forever. He takes the opportunity to duck under the hot water, reaching up to adjust the faucet to a height for normal people- if he leaves it alone, the water hits him in the general vicinity of his lungs.

Standing under the scalding flow of water is possibly the best thing he's done in weeks, and so Seifer does it for as long as he can, until Quistis nudges him out of the way to rinse out her hair; the water that flows down the drain as she works is clouded and ash-brown. He runs his hands over her scalp, checking for bits of glass and debris she might've missed. There isn't any that he can find, but when she turns around, he sees that the short cut over her eye has reopened.

"You okay?" she asks, giving him the same once-over treatment. Her fingers skate across the bruise on his ribs, and he inhales. She drops her hands, resting them at his hips. "Sorry."

"It's fine. Just banged up. You're bleeding again."

She touches her forehead, glances at the streak of red on her fingers, and sighs. "Do we have any bandages left?"

"I don't know. It's not that bad, though."

She lifts her forehead to the spray of water; the blood rinses off easily, but she keeps her eyes closed for a few minutes, luxuriating in the feel of the water.

He touches her face, tracing his fingers along the blue streaks near her eyes, and Quistis leans her head into his hand, the water cascading from her forehead along his thumb. There is always this, the moment after battle and the euphoria of it has faded, the time when all he cares about is that they are alive.

It is so much more now than it was before, because he _knows _what it feels like to lose her now, not just the idea of it. To go through that again will kill him.

He pulls her toward him. She encircles her arms around his waist, her head against his chest, and they stand like that until the water runs cold against his spine.

_xx_

Seifer has long since passed out, sprawled across the bed with his mission report half completed, and Quistis plucks the datapad out of his fingers, saving the document and putting the device to sleep before setting it aside. Her own report is done, double checked and sent in. There isn't much to say; tomorrow, another team will sweep through after the riots have settled. Cleanup is someone else's problem.

Unconsciously, he rolls toward her, flopping his arm across her stomach, and Quistis smooths his hair back from where it hangs in his eyes; he needs it cut, she notes absently, running her fingers through the strands.

She leaves him to his dreams, sliding out from under his arm and slipping on her shoes, picking up Save the Queen in its case by the door.

Garden is quiet tonight, and stays that way for her journey to the Training Center. She deposits the case in the locker room, and nods to the night-shift SeeD as she enters the center itself. inside, it is still daylight, and the monsters are out in full force, eager for fresh meat.

The lesser foes aren't even worth her time, and Quistis takes the shortcut to the far end, Save the Queen quickly gaining a coat of gore on its barbs and coils. The Rexaurs are this way, weaker than she would've liked, but she hasn't really got a choice without having to go through the hassle of renting a Garden car and getting somewhere far away. Garden Council regulations only allow for a certain rank of monster, for the safety of the cadets. Full SeeDs have been protesting the regulation for years.

Her fingers are getting cold, and she tightens the grip on her weapon as she approaches the clearing.

_Hm. Convenient. _

There is a T-Rexaur just beyond the edge of the clearing- she can see its monstrous speckled body peeking through the trees. It's eating something, the tearing of flesh and sinew audible from here. It's distracted. Good.

Quistis takes a mental inventory, and then a deep breath before coiling up Save the Queen and clipping the whip to its hook on her belt. She closes her eyes (_a mistake_, years of training tell her, but her instincts say _yes, yes, yes_). She slips into the trees, away from the prying eyes of security cameras. She does not want this on film, not yet.

The first spell comes bubbling up out of her fingers, when she finally gets within firing distance of the beast, a howling of wind and ice, something she doesn't have a name for, yet.

It hits the T-Rexaur square on the side of its head, and the monster roars, hauling itself to its feet, flinging its head from side to side from the blast. The sound of its scream sends a shiver running down her spine.

The ground shakes under her feet as the Rex advances. Quistis reaches for her whip out of reflex, but clenches a fist to keep from completing the maneuver.

_Closer. Just a bit closer_.

She can hear the jungle noise behind her, a bevy of beasts all waiting to eat her whole.

The spell surges up out of her, exploding from her palms, massive shards of ice and lightning coalescing in the air, aiming straight for the dinosaur. The recoil of the magic nearly knocks her on her feet, but she holds her ground.

The tremors stop and the spell fades, and Quistis drops her hands.

Where there was a T-Rexaur, there is now only the smoking ruin of one, a crater and the shadow of its existence the only things left in the Training Center.

_xx_

She is sitting in her office, staring out the window, when Seifer finds her early the next morning.

"I killed a Rexaur," Quistis says without preamble, glancing over at him. "Last night."

"Congratulations." Seifer yawns. "Or am I missing something?"

"I _annihilated_ a Rex," she corrects. "The spell I used- Seifer, it was incredible. It brought a monster that size down to-it's like it took the whole thing apart on a molecular level. There wasn't even any _blood_ left."

He raises an eyebrow at her, and Quistis can tell he doesn't quite get it. "One hit," she clarifies. "Well, two. One to get its attention and the other-" Her voice trails off. "I should tell Xu."

"That's probably not the best idea," Seifer says. "Something like that- for all we know, she'll have you in chains as fast as Rinoa. Maybe faster."

The words are implied, hanging heavy between them: _You're more dangerous. _

But he doesn't know how it feels, this great rushing current through her veins. How she is _unstoppable-_ how she hasn't junctioned a new GF in weeks, how she knows it won't work. The reports she submitted to Xu after the incident say that there is an accelerated shift in her abilities as a blue mage, and Quistis deliberately leaves out the word, "succession." If she doesn't think about it too hard, she can almost believe what she wrote. Almost.

"I know. I _know_. I just thought you should be... aware." The high from her discovery is wearing off, and Quistis stretches, feeling the muscles stretch and pop in her back and shoulders. How long has she been sitting here, anyway, recording notes and data, thinking about all the implications this could have on the blue mage classification? On her? On Seifer?

_-the succession always kontinues. _

She stands abruptly. "I'm starving," she announces, and doesn't give him room to argue the change in conversation before walking out of the room. She can hear him sigh behind her, but he follows (_he will always follow_), and when he catches up, he takes her hand, squeezing it once.

"Be careful," he murmurs, so quietly that she thinks she might have just been imagining it.


	2. two

_two_

This must be the soldier's version of the walk of shame, Rinoa realizes in a sudden moment of clarity, dragging all of these boxes one by one down to the garage, loading up the last car they will ever be allowed to borrow from Garden. They've already crammed Squall's fancy convertible with lamps and photos and books, all the fragile things.

There isn't even time to sort and label, not really. There is a deadline looming, and if they are not out of Balamb Garden by the time the clock ticks over, they will be taken off the premises in handcuffs.

It could be worse, she knows. She could be dead, and not just cast into exile. There are harsher prisons than Esthar, like D-District, the place of nightmares. It's almost ironic- their original self-styled exile is now their permanent one. She supposes it all comes full-circle eventually.

Esthar sent her into space, Esthar sheltered her from a would-be assassin, Esthar drew the worst of herself out, and Esthar is the only place that is not rioting against her, the only place that will have her as a resident. Strange, considering its history with sorceresses, with the Cry. She knows it won't be as easy once she's actually within their borders.

The bangle around her wrist presses painfully into her arm, and she wants nothing more than to stop, to set the box down on the edge of the fountain and adjust the bracelet. There are eyes on her everywhere, though, and the countdown stops for nothing. Rinoa shifts the box just a little bit in her arms, trying to alleviate the pressure, and keeps walking, her footsteps echoing in the atrium's silence.

_xx_

He packs with absent soldier's precision, shirts, pants, boxers, socks, all folded tightly and crammed into his large green duffel. There are certain things he will be allowed to keep, Lionheart, for instance, although he will never be allowed access to the paramagic bullets that make it what it is, this bag, assigned to him as a cadet and wearing around the seams. His medals, awards, the contents of his bank account (plus everything accrued in his retirement fund). The Council could have very well left him penniless, but it seems they have a heart after all, despite taking everything away from him.

He shoves his toiletry bag in amongst a nest of white shirts, and coils up a stack of belts.

A dishonorable discharge. His wife put in perpetual chains (the Odine bangle is never coming off), a formal dismissal from Garden. Will they only remember him for running away, like Seifer? Or will they still talk about his role in the Sorceress War?

His laptop has already been confiscated, sent down to the tech lab to be wiped of everything except, perhaps, the ubiquitous game of solitaire. His datapad has gotten the same treatment. It doesn't matter. There are computers in Esthar, boring, mundane ones without all the secure channels and remote uplinks. His cell phone is replaced with one approved by Xu, a sleek touchscreen device. They don't even reprogram in his address book, and Squall doesn't doubt that there's a tracking device embedded in this one, too, so that Garden will always know where he is.

His uniforms are in crisp black garment bags, laid across the last stack of boxes to be taken out to the car. They're letting him keep those. (For what? It isn't like he'll need to wear them again. He wonders if they'll let him be buried in his commander's uniform, when the day comes. He doesn't have a normal suit.)

All the furniture stays, stripped down and cleaned and repurposed for another SeeD's apartment. Another SeeD's life.

There is swearing somewhere behind him, Zell fighting with the hand-truck as he tries to negotiate the turn between the door and the living area. He'll be driving the truck to Esthar. There is supposed to be a SeeD waiting for them upon arrival at the presidential palace, who will bring Garden's property back.

Squall folds the garment bags in half and sets them in the remaining space in the duffel. He zips it closed, slinging the strap over his shoulder and hauling it out of the bedroom.

"That it?" Zell asks, as Squall dumps the bag onto the cart.

"Three more boxes." At least the last person he'll deal with as a SeeD will be a friend. They didn't take that from him. "Rinoa's got some bags, I don't know what's in them."

Zell nods, scratching the back of his head. "Okay. We'll take this load out and then be on our way, I guess."

Squall nods once, and turns back to the bedroom. They work in mostly silence, only saying the occasional instruction- _it's heavy, put that one here_.

Rinoa reappears at one point, and starts looking in all the cabinets, double-checking to make sure they haven't left anything behind. She fills a plastic grocery sack with the last few things in the refrigerator, a box of tea, a can of coffee. The bedroom gets the same treatment- Squall can hear her going through drawers with ruthless efficiency.

She's taking this remarkably well, he thinks, considering the circumstances.

"Done," his wife announces, coming out of the bedroom with the bag in one hand and her purse slung over her shoulder. She holds out a book to him. "I don't know if you want this."

He takes the battered paperback, a dog-eared copy of _Battle Histories and Strategies_, well-thumbed. He flips to the end of the book- it has a Balamb Garden library card stuck on the back cover. "Library book," he says. "I'll drop it off."

Zell clears his throat. "I'll take this to the garage," he announces, a little too loudly, but he's gone before anyone can object, the apartment door sliding shut behind him.

Squall looks around the apartment once. It looks so strange empty, stark white spots on the walls where framed photos have hung for nearly six years. It's a rarity that a SeeD marries a civilian and stays on the premises, but he was commander then. He didn't have time for the luxury of off-campus housing, of housework and mundane life.

He realizes that, tomorrow, he won't have to get up at 0600 unless he wants to.

"Okay," he says. "Okay, let's go."

_xx_

__The last thing Balamb Garden takes from him is seven gil in late fees, which he pays in crisp bills.

He walks out of the library, hands shoved in his pockets, and nearly walks right by Quistis when she calls his name. He stops, and she is walking toward him, a white paper bag in her hand.

"Some food for the road," she says, by way of greeting. She's got this look on her face, not quite a smile, something sad and unsure. "It's cold cuts and things from the caf. I wasn't sure exactly what you'd want." Squall takes the bag. She's still looking out for him, even after all this time, and he is suddenly grateful that Rinoa chose to help Zell load the truck while he made his detour.

"I'm sorry," he blurts, _for getting you fired when I was sixteen, for putting you through this, for everything. _He doesn't deserve this kind of friendship. Not from her. Not after what Rinoa has done, not after he has enabled Rinoa to do it.

She hugs him abruptly, surprising him so much with the force of it that he nearly drops her gift. "Don't be," she tells him fiercely. "You two don't deserve this."

He hugs her back, ignoring the awkwardness that builds in his gut from this public display of alliance. She could get into so much trouble for doing this, for helping them in any way, and she _doesn't care_.

It's more than he could have ever deserved.

"Be careful," Quistis adds, once she releases him. "Stay out of trouble. Call me when you get there."

"I'll try," he replies. "Thanks." The word is inadequate, but it is all he has.

She leaves him then, turning sharply on her heel and hurrying down the concourse. He watches her go for a second, noting how the cadets part to let her pass. They stare at her, then stare at him. He turns away, aware that he's on video in the surveillance room, every movement being reported to Xu.

The clock is ticking.

When he gets in the car, slamming the door closed, Rinoa is watching him.

"She's more of a threat than I am," his wife says; she would know. She can feel the electric hum of Quistis' magic, and before they clamped the bangle around Rinoa's wrist to shut down her powers, he could feel it second-hand.

"It doesn't matter," he replies, and the words are harsher than he intends. "I can't do anything about it anymore."

"You could-"

"I don't want to talk about this," Squall interjects. He can feel the hurt in her; she has been under so much stress that it's only logical she would be angry, lashing out. The Council has spent weeks picking apart their lives, their relationship, demanding every intimate detail. Rinoa _knows_ that the only reason she doesn't have a bullet through her brain right now is because Quistis fought her way back somehow, and then went on to testify to Rinoa's character. "Sorry."

Rinoa shrugs, and when he glances over at her, she is fiddling with the bangle, twisting it around her arm.

Squall can't help but think that it was easier when he could hear what she was thinking. He floors the gas and does eighty miles an hour out of Balamb, leaving the Garden truck in his dust.


	3. three

_three_

She breathes his name; the exhalation is warm against his cheek, the word is her fingers digging into his shoulders. Every syllable is the feeling of her skin, her legs wrapped around his waist, the moonlight glinting off of her golden hair.

_Iloveyou_ is whispered in the dark, given and received, a balm of absolution, the forgiveness of sins.

He kisses her, hard and hot; she tugs at his lip with her teeth, insistent, wanting, _wanting_.

_-there, there, right there_, she urges, her hands raking up his spine.

Her name escapes his lips, all raw, sharp edges of need, and she arches up to him, bucking against his hips, and he loves her, he _loves her_, he will follow her into hell and beyond-

_-forever? _

_-forever._

The world expands and contracts and explodes on itself, and he wraps her up in his arms, his heart galloping in his chest and the scent of sweat and sex in the air. She nuzzles against his throat, leaving a gentle trail of kisses in her wake, and he draws his fingers through her hair, gently combing it back over her shoulder.

She murmurs into the hollow of his neck, sleepy and sated, a goddess after the sacrifice, her hand possessively tracing over the lines of his chest. He presses his lips against the crown of her head.

_Did you say something?_

_Iloveyou_ is whispered in the dark, a damnation, the disease that cripples the heart.

_xx_

_What are you waiting for_?

She sits at the big round table in the boardroom. Xu is calling up graph after graph on the board, pointing out the mission route and details with precise, clipped specifications. This has been going on for, what, thirty minutes?

Quistis glances at the clock. Thirty-three minutes, now.

_This is taking far too long. _

She clenches her hand against her leg, rubbing the heel of her hand into her leg. The room is too small, too windowless, too airless. Maybe she's getting sick.

Fresh air would help.

_No, it won't. _

Xu is droning on and on.

She's fairly certain she's heard this mission before. It's a carbon copy of the same ones that they have been on for days now. Quell the riots, protect the minister, the president, the mayor, the mayor's daughter's pet monkey.

Seifer has been given the opportunity to decline this particular mission, using some hoarded leave time. Quistis envies him, his comfortable, relaxed state, stretched out on the sofa with a beer and the television remote.

_How do you know that?_

She left him sleeping this morning, but she can see him, clear as day, half-dozing, a tied college basketball game playing on the television, filling the room with the droning of cheers, voices, announcers- _halftime_, someone says, and Seifer shifts, rolls, winces, presses his hand to his side. The bruises are taking their sweet time to heal, faded now to a yellowish purple. The shoe tread pattern is still visible in the right lighting.

_-"Quistis_,_"_ _and his voice is ragged with want of her_-

"Instructor Trepe. Are you alright?"

Xu's voice snaps her back into reality (_which reality_?), and Quistis sits upright in her chair. "Fine," she says, and her voice is a little distant, a little unsure, drawing the attention of the other SeeDs in the room. She clears her throat, tries again. It comes out steadier the second time, and Xu raises an eyebrow, but turns back to the map she's called up.

(_Galbadia shoots, scores, _the television says, and Seifer swears, but he's distracted, his attention divided.)

The briefing ends ten minutes later, not nearly soon enough. She is the first person out of the room, ignoring Xu's curious glances. She avoids the queue at the elevator, taking the stairs.

(_-into hell and beyond, no matter what, no matter what-)_

"Hey," Seifer calls, and he's exactly where she imagined he'd be- sitting on the couch, beer in hand. She crosses the room, grabs the remote, and shuts off the television. "I was watching-"

"Shut up," she says, and before he can protest, Quistis perches on his lap and touches his face. It seems redundant, once she's got her hands on his forehead, but she keeps them there regardless. "Think of something. Anything."

He raises an eyebrow at her, confused. "O-kay."

It happens instantly- _what the hell is wrong with you (the rush of wings and the scratching of claws) Galbadia was going to get their ass kicked (not like this, not like this) and I am going to miss it- _and she rips her hands away, the images searing across her own mind.

"Were you sleeping? Before I came here."

"Yeah, for like twenty minutes."

"Did you dream?"

"What? Why does that matter?"

"_Did _you?" She has to know. (_You already know, _someone in the back of her mind whispers, slithering across her fears.)

"Yeah, probably. Are you feeling alright?" He puts his hand against her forehead, like she is a child, and his touch lets loose a volley of sensation, worry and fear knotted around each other, _are you going crazy? _

"I can-" She licks her lips, swallows. "I think I can hear what you're thinking."

He stares at her, eyes wide, _were they always that green?, _she wonders, and she realizes that she's got a death grip on his shoulders, her knuckles white, her nails digging into his skin. When she withdraws her hands, she leaves deep crescent marks behind. She folds her hands in her lap.

(Minutes go by in absolute silence, and she might be imagining it, but she thinks she can hear the pixels clicking over in the digital clock on the wall.)

There is no one on this planet who knows more about this than he does; she can see it in every angle of his expression, every miniscule movement in his jaw as he opens his mouth to speak, and closes it again. At one point, he covers her hands with his, then in another moment he takes them away.

(There are pictures, snatches and shards, Edea in her black gown, her own face, seen through his eyes, terrified, when she woke up and found herself in the infirmary, the agony of loss and grief and things too horrible to name. A page in the history books- _the bond between Sorceress and Knight has led to certain abilities such as telepathic links-_)

"Please say something," she says after the silence becomes unbearable. She gets up, paces toward the window, waiting for a response.

"Okay," and his voice is steady, not at all what she expected. "Okay."

She turns her head. He's looking at her, but he's not running away, not screaming, not chasing her with a pitchfork and torch. "That's it?"

Seifer nods.

It doesn't feel like it's enough. There should be something, some terror, some panic, some horrified gasp. She looks at him, really _looks_; he is so clear to her, so in focus that it's painful, and she can _still hear him. _

_(Yes, yes, yes, _the voice whispers, _that's it,_ and something falls into place, snap, snap, snap. The image in her head is one of Edea in her crown of horns and mantle of obsidian, luring Seifer through the veil, beckoning- _come with me, to a place of no return, _only it's not Edea's face, it's hers, seared with blue whorls and streaks, it's her drawing him to her, sealing his soul to hers forever- _come with me_._)_

His voice, distant, distorted, saying something- her name, she realizes, why is he shouting at her like that, she's _right here_-

But then there is the sensation of falling, a white-hot bomb blast of light behind her eyes, and then there is-


	4. four

_four_

Amidst the din of the restaurant, they sit in silence.

Rinoa fiddles with her fork, flipping it over and over again. Laguna sips from his glass of wine. Squall tugs at the sleeves of his borrowed dinner jacket, ignoring everyone, trying to make the fabric long enough to go past his wrists. It is a relief when the food finally shows up, and the waiter deposits plates in front of them. Small talk has been attempted once, then aborted.

"More wine?" the waiter asks the president, and Laguna nods. Rinoa raises her hand as well, indicating that she, too, needs a refill. The waiter turns his attention to Squall. "Another beer, sir?"

Squall nods once. The waiter leaves.

Silence is broken up by the clinking of silverware against plates, the sounds of eating, drinking once the beverages are dispensed.

"Not bad," Laguna comments, and Squall shrugs.

"I guess."

Laguna swallows another mouthful of wine. "I know you guys would've rather stayed in. I'm sorry. We could've ordered pizza or something."

"It's not a big deal, Laguna. We're just tired. It's been a long day." Rinoa pushes the peas around on her plate with her fork. The bangle clinks against the plate- she's paired it with a wide silver bracelet, so it looks like little more than jewelry. "It's a great restaurant. Thank you."

Squall can feel the faint echoes of her irritation at him when he doesn't say anything. He doesn't look at her. "Yeah, thanks."

It's surprising how easy it is to appease Laguna. His father smiles and turns his attention back to his steak. Squall takes a deep pull of his beer. It's good, a Galbadian brew, an old favorite of a long-gone friend.

Rinoa reaches across the table and squeezes Squall's hand. "Eat," she orders him gently, so he stabs his fork into a bit of mushroom and does. He's always been good at following orders.

_xx_

Her reflection is someone she does not know.

Quistis stares in the bathroom mirror, examining the woman looking back at her critically. Blonde hair, loose around her face- she yanks it back and turns her head from side to side. Coming back from nowhere (_from death_, she is reminded) has left her with faint blue streaks across her cheeks, like remnants of exposure that have not gone away, a pale parody of the veins on Edea's skin during her possession.

The marks are changing, though. The lines are edged with a darker blue, more pronounced, stark against her pale skin. Her eyes are rimmed in it, like she has gone to town with eyeliner.

"It doesn't matter," she tells her reflection sternly. "This doesn't mean you're going crazy."

_This doesn't mean you're going to compress time, doesn't mean you're going to destroy the world and everyone you love. This doesn't mean that at all. _

Quistis rips open the medicine cabinet and pulls out her makeup bag. She's halfway done applying her foundation when Seifer opens the door to the bathroom.

"Don't you knock?" she asks irritably, pressing her brush into the compact and working on the left side of her face. She has a boat to catch in an hour, a mission to Centra, and this is wasting time she does not have to spare.

"How long have we known each other?" He leans against the door frame, all long limbs and smooth angles, his arms crossed as he studies her. "What are you going to do about that?"

"Nothing." She plucks out a bottle of eyeliner, dark brown, and draws it over the lines around her eyes carefully.

"It's getting worse."

"Yes. I know that. Thanks."

"Are you going to tell Xu?"

"No." Quistis twists the lid on the eyeliner tightly, too tightly- the tiny plastic bottle cracks and spatters brown makeup all over her hands and the sink. "_Shit_," she swears, dropping the bottle, wrenching on the tap. The makeup comes off her hands in globs, leaving the white porcelain streaked with brown.

From somewhere in the bedroom, her cell phone rings. Quistis does a hasty job on the rest of the eyeliner. "Did you use the last towel?"

He shrugs. "Yeah, probably."

Quistis runs her hands down the front of his t-shirt and ducks out of the bathroom as he swats at her. His annoyance thrums through her, threaded with amusement, and something she cannot quite name.

It baffles her, this link, this knowledge of every part of him. She doesn't have time to dwell on the fact, though, and snatches her phone off of the table. "Trepe."

"You've been contracted to Deling instead," Xu says by way of greeting. "Presidential guard duty."

"Alright. Seifer, too?"

"No. Just you. There's a plane leaving in twenty minutes."

Quistis hangs up. "I have to go, she says. "Deling City."

Seifer nods. To his credit, he doesn't ask her if she's okay, even though she can feel it running through him. She was only out for a minute, not enough to even justify a trip to the infirmary. A couple of aspirin, a few hours spent napping, and she's _fine. _It's just stress. Just the shock of-

"How long?"

-_knowing everything-_

"I don't know. I'll call you when I find out." She pockets her phone and heads back into the bathroom, stuffing her toothbrush and her contacts into her travel case. Her hair is a lost cause, and so she simply yanks it back into a ponytail. The frames of her glasses distract from the fact that she's wearing too much makeup.

Packing takes even less time- she brings the same bag for every mission. Two pairs of pants, two shirts, things she can wash in sinks. She dresses quickly, black pants, white blouse, black jacket. The official uniform of the hired guard. Her boots are expensive, elegantly designed, steel-toed. She zips the soft leather closed, wiggling her toes to get a feel for the boots. The jacket is cut smoothly enough to loop Save the Queen on her belt and not have it be obvious. No matter what, she is always her most comfortable armed.

"Have fun," Seifer says, and when she kisses him goodbye, she tastes a thread of worry and the thudding of his heartbeat.

_xx_

Balamb Garden's gym isn't exactly humming with activity at three thirty in the morning, so Seifer takes the liberty of popping the lock on the maintenance room door and wiring his music player directly into the sound system. It doesn't take much work, and within a minute, he has the gym booming with some classic rock from an old band in Timber.

Quistis' lousy sleep habits and late-night missions have left him too wired to go back to bed. The track stretches around the room, a quarter mile of smooth rubber that's generally only used when the weather sucks, and Seifer stretches his arms over his head as he walks toward the marked starting line, feeling his muscles loosen. He pauses, pulls his legs up one at a time. His knees pop, something they wouldn't have done seven years ago. Maybe he's getting too old for this shit.

He starts running, falling in time with the beat of the music, not pushing anything. He's been thinking about that a lot, lately, getting older.

If the history books are true, Quistis will outlive him by a wide margin.

Maybe it's time to retire. Coming back to SeeD wasn't exactly a choice, and now that Puberty Boy's out for good, Seifer doesn't know if he cares to stay around much longer under Xu's tyrannical rule. Most SeeDs are out by thirty, anyway, if they're not dead.

Lap two, and track two, a screaming heavy-metal band that Raijin introduced him to, music Quistis _hates_.

Out by thirty. He's almost twenty-eight.

Seifer runs.

His girlfriend's a sorceress.

Seifer runs.

Something's going to give.

Seifer runs. Lap three, lap four, lap five.

He wonders what Quistis would say if he asked- _hey, you wanna go buy a house in the suburbs and have two and a half kids? _

It never works out like that.

The song builds, reaching its boiling, screaming climax. He runs, runs, pushing himself now, heading for the line, the rubber surface of the track giving under his shoes and propelling him forward, so much easier than running on sand.

She'd probably want to get married or something crazy.

He propels his body forward, faster, _faster_, c'mon, man, records to beat, reasons to gloat. _You're not that old. _

His faded blue trainers hit the starting line.

There's a discord in the song, a searing shriek he doesn't remember, and suddenly, he is flying through the air as the wall of the gym explodes behind him.

(It's not the falling that's scary, it's knowing how painful the impact is going to be.)

The ground rushes up to meet him, and he twists himself, presenting as small a target as he can manage, but the pain is blinding when his shoulder meets the ground, a white-hot explosion, worse than being shot at, being sliced with Lionheart, a thousand times worse than Save the Queen's barbs embedding into his skin. The hard tile of the gym floor is not as forgiving as the track.

He lays there, gasping, his good arm thrown over his head, shielding his face from the rubber and debris that rains down around him.

_Should've retired when Xu took over. _

Distantly, he knows this is a ridiculous thought to have, but the idea is drowned out by another explosion, somewhere far away, in a different part of Garden.


	5. five

_five_

-_the blistering heat against skin and the agony, the agony of the impact is the worst-_

She has her phone out before she even realizes it's ringing, and it's the order she expected, the recall, Xu screaming in the phone in the way that one does when they're made half-deaf by an explosion.

"Turn around!" Quistis commands, and the cadet driving her to the airfield glances at her in the rearview mirror.

"Ma'am?"

"Now, turn _around_!"

He complies, jerking the wheel in a one-eighty, cutting off the car in the opposite lane. There is the staccato blaring of horns, but the Garden car rockets forward.

-_this hurts so fucking badly_-

The cadet slows as they approach Balamb Garden, staring out the window, his profile aghast. "What happened here?" he exclaims, and Quistis could ask the self-same question. Smoke billows from three points that she can decipher- the gym, the library, the-

The dorms are on fire. Oh, god, the dorms are on fire.

_-goddammit-_

She opens the door and hits the ground running, Save the Queen beating rhythmically against her hip, sliding off the kevlar-reinforced fabric of her pants. Garden is in chaos, people everywhere, streaming out of the building from every available door.

Someone grabs her arm. Raijin is there, wild-eyed, his hair sticking up in every direction and his bare chest streaked with ash.

"What happened?" she demands, and he shakes his head.

"I don't know. Woke up to the blasts and next thing, the commander's ordering everyone to evacuate."

There are children everywhere, twelve- and thirteen-year-olds in shock and in tears. She didn't realize that there were this many children in Garden. Which part of the dorms got hit? The SeeD wing? The cadet area?

"I don't know," Rajin says. "I gotta find Fuj." And he is gone, then, leaving her alone.

_Seifer_, she thinks, as hard as she can, but there is only a rush of silence that leaves a gnawing knot of dread building in her stomach.

The scream of fire engines cut through the freezing dawn, and she is denied entry to Garden by a chain of stoic SeeDs whose names she does not know, despite her protests, her insistence that the commander has summoned her here, her violent swearing, _Seifer is in there and he might be dying_-

Xu texts her, directing her to the far side of Garden, and Quistis runs around the building, completing the circuit faster than she ever has on any of her regular runs. The smoke is billowing from the dorms in clouds, massive gray plumes that leave her gasping. The heat is oppressive- she ditches her jacket as she approaches the gathered crowd.

The commander is there, in her sweatpants and cutoff tank top, directing soldiers, paramedics and firefighters alike with aide of a bullhorn that she has pulled from god-knows-where. There are bodies everywhere, stretched out on the grass, some moving, some not. More than the ambulances can hold. Men, women- the bulk of the smoke is coming from the SeeD wing. There aren't as many smaller figures as Quistis had feared.

"Quistis!" Xu yells, dashing across the lawn. No one would notice the hints of panic in Xu's eyes unless they had known her as long as Quistis has. Xu grabs her shoulders, the most contact they have had in months, far from the hugs and easy gestures they used to share. Her friend has become a stranger, but that doesn't matter now. Not after this.

"What happened?"

"I don't know. Intelligence is analyzing the remains of some of the explosives now. They'll have a list of suspects in the next few hours." Xu's tone is still loud, still off. She keeps leaning toward the left, trying to compensate for a loss of hearing. "I haven't seen Seifer, but they're taking all the injured to the hospital."

Every inch of her wants to go, hitch a ride on an ambulance, to rip through the covered, prone figures lying in the grass. To find him.

She stays, though, put to work, handed a respirator and gloves as she joins the search teams working their way through the building once sections are cleared. After two hours, the dorms are finally opened up to SeeD, and her team is the first through. Xu gives express orders to be careful, but thorough. _Get everyone out_.

It's the worst part. They find a first year, curled up in her bed, head cracked open by a weapons case. Another, gasping and unable to move out from under where his dresser has fallen onto his legs. He screams for his mother when they haul the furniture out of the way, and he will never walk again.

They find too many bodies burned up into horrific shapes that she will see forever in her nightmares.

The apartment that she shares with Seifer is the last one in the cleared zone, and the door has been blasted open with the impact. Quistis stops in the doorway, breathing her air supply, while an explosives detail SeeD carefully walks the room one last time.

"Clear," Instructor Shang calls, and Quistis steps forward before she can stop herself. The apartment is surprisingly intact- most of their pictures are on the floor, and the window has blown out. The TV is a loss. The furniture is still upright, though, and the coffee mug she left in the sink is still exactly where she set it.

None of that is important- things are replaceable. She has enough in her account to buy a hundred televisions.

The walk into the bedroom has Quistis expecting the worst, and when she finds the bed empty, the coverlet half-heartedly pulled flat and the pillow smooth, her knees nearly give out from under her.

Quistis turns away, and when she climbs over the wreckage, escaping onto the lawn, the first breath of fresh air leaves her lungs feeling tender and new-made. She pitches her respirator in the growing pile nearby. Someone offers her a bottle of water, and she drains half of it.

Xu tries to stop her, but Quistis ignores her, and climbs in the back of an ambulance next to the boy with the ruined legs.

_xx_

-_no return, boy or man, boy or man, talons and lover's flesh and Odin's face when Hyperion screamed through the air-_

He wakes up to the hollow beeping of machines.

There is a scraping sound nearby, and Quistis is leaning over him, looking just out of focus. "Hey," she says, and her voice is so quiet. He's having trouble hearing her, or anything.

"What?" He's having trouble breathing, for that matter. Every inhalation is searing in his throat.

She touches his face, and her words are tinny, hard to make out. _You scared me. _

He blinks and she is gone, and the light in the room is different. Everything hurts. He blinks again.

Someone's touching him, lifting his arm and pressing against his pulse. Someone's touching him, fiddling around his face. There is the cool feeling of a compress against his brow. It's hard to think. His brain feels like mud. There's a stinging in his arm, and then something cold through his veins.

Xu is there at one point, asking him questions. He doesn't remember what she asks, her words muffled and deadened, and he doesn't remember what he answered. He isn't even sure he does answer.

There are long swatches of time that he spends coughing, hacking up globs of black stuff into bedpans held by nurses who make sympathetic noises.

When he opens his eyes again, Quistis is back, and she's a little clearer, her brow furrowed as she studies him. She slips her hand into his and the command he gives his fingers to close around hers seems to take forever to process down his arm.

"Hi."

She smiles, relief all over her face. "Hey. How're you feeling?" Each word is carefully pronounced, and he wonders just how loudly she's actually speaking.

Seifer does a mental inventory, taking particular note of the hot spot of pain in his shoulder. "Hurts," he pronounces. The word comes out sounding like he's got marbles in his mouth. He wonders what they've got him on, because he doesn't hurt as badly as he should. "What happened?"

"The group responsible for the riots in Dollet and Deling- they're claiming responsibility. Xu's got people working around the clock trying to hunt them down." She runs her thumb along his palm. "She wants you to come in for an interview. When you're feeling up to it, of course."

"Comfy here."

"That's what I told her."

"How bad?" Seifer asks, finally, because she's doing that thing where she dances around what she really wants to say. His brain may be working at the speed of molasses, but he's not fundamentally idiotic.

There is a long moment of silence, and he wonders if he fell asleep again, if she left. But her hand is still in his, and her face is working its way through a gamut of emotions. She's always worn her heart on her sleeve, calls it her biggest fault.

"Bad," she says. "Twenty SeeDs are dead. At least three times that, including you, stuck here for a while. Five second years holding a last-minute study session in the library." Her grip on his hand tightens. He wonders just how close he came to being number twenty-six. He doesn't ask. "We're transferring people to Galbadia and Timber until the dorms are habitable."

"House in the suburbs," he mumbles- _should've retired early. _

She raises an eyebrow at him. "What?"

"Nothing."

_xx_

The pictures on the television send her recoiling to the bathroom, heaving into the toilet with the images of ruin seared into her eyes. Squall has sat in numb horror for the last hour, watching.

Rinoa heaves again, bringing up only acidic bile. There isn't anything in her stomach to throw up, thank god. She's never been so grateful for a lapse in appetite as she is now.

She reaches up, flushing the toilet, and leans back against the wall. This isn't her fault. She isn't responsible for this, she _isn't. _She's left Garden. No anti-Sorceress group should be going there to look for her, to murder her.

Her hand curls over her stomach, and when she closes her eyes, she sees the wreckage of Balamb Garden, and something whispers, _it's all because of you. _


	6. six

_six_

Balamb General doesn't have enough beds after three days- too many SeeDs working themselves sick with smoke inhalation and nausea and stress, not to mention it's peak fishing season and more people are coming through gored by sailfish than they would ever like to admit- so Seifer is ejected from the hospital with a heavy duty prescription and his arm in a sling. His hearing is still muffled; liberal application of diluted cure drops help, but not by much. He doesn't like it. It puts him off balance.

Garden puts them up in a cramped third story walk-up at the far end of town, the best they can do on short notice.

It takes Seifer thirty minutes to get up the stairs the first time, with the morphine cocktail running through his veins and the ache in his shoulder. The apartment's floor plan is unfamiliar, cramped, worse than the dorm's. He runs into things when he does get out of bed over the next couple of days, boxes and bags that there aren't any room for. Their salvageable furniture is tagged and stored in the quad of Garden, along with everyone else's.

Dressing himself with one good arm is an interesting challenge. The official diagnosis is a torn rotator cuff, a cracked clavicle, a hairline fracture down his humerus bone. He's just glad he landed on his left side. If he'd rolled the other way, it'd be harps for his gunblading career.

Xu orders him to temporary headquarters two days after he gets out of the hospital, her patience worn thin with terse emails and voice mails that never get returned. Headquarters is the old Balamb Hotel, at the far end of town, looking like it's going to fall into the sea with one strong wind. The commander has occupied the penthouse suite, and when he walks in, she's at her desk, dressed in her civvies. It's the first time Seifer has seen her out of uniform in a long time, but that's what happens when your dorm room is blown to smithereens with your wardrobe.

"Sit down," she orders, when Seifer lets himself into the room. "You're late. You were due here at 0900."

He shrugs and regrets the maneuver. "Being blown up has that effect on my schedule."

She doesn't look up from what she's working on until Seifer has settled himself into the ill-designed wooden chair. When she finally does glance at him, she raises an eyebrow. "Well. You look awful."

"That's a relief, because I feel like shit," he retorts pleasantly. "What can I do for you, Commander?"

Xu sits back in her chair and studies him over the rim of thin glasses; when did she start wearing those? Maybe she thinks it's intimidating. Maybe she's just going blind.

"How's the apartment?" Xu continues, as if he hasn't spoken at all. "Working out for you?"

"Bit small, really."

"And Quistis? How is she doing? Sleeping alright? Eating well?" Pages in the file on her desk are rifled through; she appears bored, not caring much about his answers. It's the worst therapy session ever or she wants something.

"I've hardly seen her the past few days. You would know better than I would."

Xu taps her heavy silver pen against the pad of paper on her desk. "I just want to make sure everyone under my charge is doing well, especially in the wake of what's happened."

_Bullshit_.

"I need you to do something for me, Seifer. I've been worried about her, and she's not been the most forthcoming recently. You'll let me know if anything...strange starts happening, right? Anyone would be in a state after what she's been through."

It takes him a second to process through what she's asking, and when he gets to the root of it, he's pissed immediately. "I'm not spying on her."

"I'm not suggesting that at all. I'm only saying-"

"I quit."

The words are out before he can stop them, and he has no interest in doing so.

It catches Xu off guard. "I beg your pardon?"

"I _quit_," he repeats. "I'm done with this, with your ridiculous spy-novel bullshit. I am _done_." He gets up ungracefully; the chair skitters backwards and clatters over onto its side. Months of frustration and fury are outpacing the sedatives in his bloodstream.

She takes off her glasses, folding them neatly and tucking them in the pocket of her shirt before she sits back and studies him. "Can you imagine, for _one _minute, what life outside of Garden will be for you? Some people don't forget, Seifer Almasy, and we can't protect you out there." She stacks together the report. "Or do you think you're going to get a chance to have a normal life? Do you think Quistis will ever leave Garden and...god, forbid, settle _down_ with you? She's a top-ranked SeeD, and you're the lapdog who came crawling home for scraps, who just happened to catch her attention."

She laughs. For fuck's sake, she _laughs. _Like this is the biggest fucking joke in the world.

He's glad he wore his boots today, no matter how fucking hard they were to get on his feet. Seifer slams the sole of one into Xu's desk, shoving the whole enterprise on its side. Xu slides her chair back just in time, ripping her laptop out of the path of destruction. The desk crashes against the floor, legs breaking off. Papers go everywhere.

"What the hell is _wrong_ with you?" she exclaims.

"You don't know _shit_ about our lives," he snarls, and he wants to grab her by the throat, repay her for all the crap she's put them through, for what a shitty friend she's been to Quistis, for getting Squall thrown out on his ass. For a hair's-breadth, his vision tinges red, the roar of battle in his ears, and he has to shake his head to dispel it. He's got better things to do with his time. She isn't worth it.

Security is swarming into the room, but Seifer shoves through the crowd, ignoring the agony in his shoulder and the pounding building in his head.

"I'm fine," he hears Xu say from behind him as he leaves. "If you see him on Garden property again, arrest him."

_xx_

The door opens, then shuts.

"How long have you been sitting in the dark?" Quistis asks after a moment. He hears a thud as she sets something down. There is the rustle of paper and the distinct smell of Centran food fills the apartment.

Seifer shifts the ice pack higher up on his shoulder. "A while."

She flicks the light switch. The transition isn't nearly as smooth as it was in the dorms; here, the lights flicker and quiver before they steady. He blinks in the brightness, and eases himself upright.

"I heard what you did," she says. "You can't just walk out like that. There's procedure, regs."

"She says she'll arrest me the next time I'm on Garden property. I think I'm pretty well out." Seifer pushes himself off of the couch, crossing into the alcove that serves as a kitchen. "Dammit, she wanted me to _spy_ on you, Quis, like you were some _mission_."

Quistis pulls a couple of white cardboard containers out of the bag. "My knight in shining armor," she says, and there isn't a trace of irony in her voice. "I brought you fried shrimp."

"I'm not hungry."

"Liar." She would know; Quistis hands him a box and a pair of chopsticks. He takes them grudgingly, setting the box on the counter and popping open the lid. "Is it true you threw her desk through a window with one hand?"

He pokes at the food, shoveling a piece of shrimp in his mouth and chewing thoughtfully. "Who said that?"

"Just a rumor I heard." Quistis digs through her salad with her fork. "Xu won't let this go quietly, you know."

"I know."

_xx_

Seifer lies away from her on the bed, cradling his left arm in its splint, his sling cast aside for the moment. His back is seared red, a horrific burn, like he's spent hours in the sun. The doctors say that if he hadn't been halfway through the gym when the bomb went off, he wouldn't have skin back there at all. Seifer claims it looks worse than it feels.

She squeezes a curl of ointment into her hand, a medicinal scent filling the room and the aloe cool where it touches her. She can see the muscles in Seifer's back tense as she lowers her palm, and he hisses as she dabs it on his hot skin.

"Sorry," she murmurs, moving her hand in slowly expanding circles as he grows used to the cream. It is a ritual she does not want, this nightly application of burn ointment, this changing of bandages and helping him work a shirt over his head.

Maybe it's for the best he's walked away from SeeD. There are only so many wounds a body can take, and they both have too many scars.

There's only so much healing magic and cure spells can do-

Healing spells. She doesn't know why it hasn't occurred to her before; she's so used to her magic being rationed and monitored, filling out paperwork for every bottle of elixir and cure that she uses. But here, in a sparse old apartment away from prying eyes, she could try...

"Stay still."

"I'm not moving," he mutters, his voice muffled in the pillow. "Are you almost done?"

"Shh."

Her fingers graze over the burn, and she concentrates, digging deep within her, past the flashy magic, the destruction and the lightning and the annihilation. There is a serene pool of power there, untapped. She has never had a reason to look for it before now.

She draws from it in a narrow stream, her fingers going frigid as she traces along his spine. The effect is instantaneous- her touch leaves a faint sparkle and tanned skin as she pulls the burn from him. The glimmer fades after a moment. She moves her hands away from his spine, down to the small of his back, reveling in how easily the burn disappears, how the heat runs up her fingers, a reverse cast.

His breathing slows and evens out as she works, and soon, she is done.

Quistis withdraws her hands and half-expects the injury to resurface, the way a sunburn looks when pressed by a finger, normal for a second until it's back to boiling scarlet. Nothing reappears, and she lets loose the breath she has been holding.

"I think they put cure spells in that crap," Seifer comments sleepily. "Feels good."

The magic still hums just below her skin, anxious to be used.

His shoulder is the obvious target, swollen, painful. She hasn't been able to sleep lately with the way he tosses and turns, favoring his left side, shifting to find some position that doesn't feel like getting tortured with hot knives (an awful sensation to feel secondhand, she has recently discovered.)

"Seifer," she whispers. _Do you trust me?_

She's already reaching for him when he nods, seeking out the root of the injury, visualizing the doctor's X-rays as she trails her fingers along the curve of his arm...

_There. _

The magic funnels through slowly, slowly, spreading out into the hollow of bone and sinew, making bridges of muscle and tendons, knitting bits of bone back together, accelerating what would have taken his body weeks to accomplish into seconds.

Seifer lets out a strangled sound of pain, pulling away from her instinctively, the veins taut in his neck. _"God_," he swears. "What the hell are you doing?" He presses his hand against his shoulder, and she can feel his anger and confusion radiating off of him in waves, the residual agony from her procedure.

"How does it feel?" she asks, even though she knows that the soreness will be fading now. She can feel it receding- (_the fuck is wrong with you__?)_

Anger is trickling away, drop by drop, as he flexes and stretches his arm carefully, his motions controlled, restrained. He winces at one point, and the jolt of surprise rushes through her.

"It's not completely fixed," she says. "There's a lot of damage. I just-"

He makes a fist, loosens it. "Beats the shit out of a month in a sling," he says, and the _thank you_ he does not say aloud.


	7. seven

_seven_

She dreams.

-_of a void, starless, black, floating, floating. In the distance, a goddess has died. No one will remember her name, or her passing. Floating, floating, seeing corpses bound in sails and the wreckage of a red Garden._

_Lightning scars up the sky and in the distance, Quistis can hear the clanging of steel against steel, and the sparks from the impact light up the sky. _

_Somewhere, she hears a little girl sobbing; she drifts toward it. "Somewhere" becomes a field of wildflowers, the air thick with the stench of them, and amongst the flowers, the little girl has golden hair and a peach dress. _

_Hello?_

_There is no response. She falls gently. The flowers are soft under her bare feet, and she walks forward. The movement is effortless. _

_The girl hiccups, whimpers, wipes her hands across her eyes. _

_Are you lost?_

_The child looks up, and Quistis recoils. The girl's face is scarred in blue, deep, violent streaks of it, and her hair is not golden anymore, but white, pure white. Her eyes are what terrify Quistis, however: they are pitch-dark, ageless, timeless. _

_You are, the girl says, and the words sear across Quistis' mind. The girl lunges, and when her tiny hands latch around Quistis' throat, the grip is ironclad. _

_xx_

She wakes up in a shroud, seeing white, only white.

Quistis scrabbles at the sheet, ripping it off of her face, rewarded with the absolute silence of the bedroom for her efforts. She tosses the sheet aside and toes around on the floor for her slippers, grabbing her robe off of the chair where she tossed it, knotting the sash around her waist. She pads out of the bedroom.

Seifer is sitting on the couch, staring at the television. An infomercial for Instant-Abs is playing- she recognizes the jingle. She's spent too many nights awake of her own to not know Balamb's two a.m. television schedule.

Seifer doesn't notice her, or if he does, he doesn't acknowledge it. His thoughts are a jumble- she catches glimpses, feelings, the image of Xu's desk on its side with papers raining down around it. Seifer has not _told _her the specifics of his meeting, but his thoughts broadcast them loud and clear. She knows by rote what Xu has said about their relationship, and she knows how horrifically deep her friend's words have cut.

Seifer presses his palm against his shoulder, working out a phantom ache.

"If you buy that, I'm breaking up with you," she comments finally, just to break the silence, and Seifer starts, looking over his shoulder at her. He picks up the remote and thumbs a button. The TV mutes.

"I thought you were asleep."

"So did I." Quistis walks around the end of the couch, a ratty blue-leather nightmare left by the previous tenants, and sits. Out of reflex, Seifer drapes his arm around her; she leans against him, watching the silent figures gesture on the screen.

Somehow, deep in his pores, beyond the woodsy scent of his aftershave and the neutral, clean smell of his deodorant, he doesn't smell right, not the way she's used to. She inhales, nosing out the strangeness- fire, smoke, ash. Remnants that she should not be able to detect.

-_all I want to do is protect you-_

They sit like that for a long time. Eventually, the infomercial ends, turning into an episode of _As The Chocobo Turns_.

"Fujin used to watch this all the time," Seifer says eventually. "Back after the war, when we didn't really have anywhere to go, and Garden didn't know if they wanted us anymore. I couldn't tell what the hell was going on, but she could tell you, right down to the minute detail, who was hooking up, getting divorced, having someone's kid." He chuckles, softly. "It was the craziest damned thing. She was worse than Rai and his stupid baseball cards."

She smiles, faintly, tracing her finger along his knee. The story is nice, it's normal, it's history that he doesn't need to share, a moment that doesn't matter.

"Do you regret it?" she asks.

"What?"

"Quitting."

"No." He pulls his fingers through her hair, drawing it back away from her face, the movement absent. "I don't need Xu's tyrannical bullshit. Plenty of people out there are willing to hire mercs without Garden's interference."

-_do anything for you_, _burn the world down-_

"You could get a normal job," she says, and even as the words leave her mouth, she knows how ridiculous they sound.

Seifer snorts. "Normal? Like what? Sit on my ass and answer a phone all day? Not fucking likely."

He needs action, movement, kicking in doors and knocking heads. He wouldn't last five minutes in the real world, and they both know that. She wouldn't, either; all she knows is regulations, orders, how to strip down a weapon and rebuild it in twenty-seven seconds. What job could she get with that on her resume? Pouring lattes at the coffee house down the street?

Garden has ruined them for normalcy.

-_a glimpse of a life of a dream blown up in smoke a house by the sea with two kids and a dog-_

"I'm sorry," she whispers, and there's a lump forming in her throat. She doesn't know what she's apologizing _for, _only that the fleeting melancholy is so overwhelming, so suffocating-

"Hey-" His hand stops, and he shifts, tenses. "You okay?"

She can't breathe, with this feeling (tick-tock-tick-tock), this sensation (the witching hour) of wanting to have nothing but (the world is shrinking) what they cannot have.

Quistis pushes herself off of the sofa and fumbles with the latches on the window, leaning out into the starlit night, goosebumps rising up on her skin immediately. She breathes, breathes, breathes, each inhalation an ice shard in the chest.

(_There is only this, this half-formed life, the knight and the witch and the fairy tale without a happy ending._)

_xx_

"Rinoa's pregnant."

Ellone looks up sharply from her coffee. "What?"

Squall stares down at his plate, picking apart the muffin on it. "She told me. Last night." Blueberry stains his fingers; he wipes his hand on the pristine napkin.

"Well. That's a development." His sister is still staring at him. "Is she sure?"

"I don't know. I guess." He picks up a ragged piece of muffin, puts it in his mouth, chews, swallows. Distantly, he hears Ellone ask him something else. "What?"

"I said, are you okay? You look kind of- pale."

He doesn't know how to explain that this isn't how it's supposed to happen. It's _not supposed to happen_. Period. All of their research, all the available texts, say that sorceresses don't reproduce. They can't support the gestation of a fetus. The magic overwhelms it, devours it. If Rinoa's pregnant- it's not going to last.

Squall pushes his plate away. "I'm fine."

Ellone sets down her mug. "This is good news, Squall. I know it's scary, but-"

"It's not that," he says, and picks up his plate and cup, taking them to the sink. He twists the knob for the tap and rinses them off methodically. "Where's your dish soap?"

He can feel Ellone's eyes on him, boring into him. Eventually, she gives up, accepts defeat, and cedes the change in conversation to him.

"Under the sink."

He digs through the cabinet- _why does she need so many sponges?- _and retrieves the soap. Methodically, he washes each piece, and when he's done with the two dishes, he starts in on the coffee maker.

"You're going to rebuild that, right?" Ellone asks, the humor in her tone forced. "I do need it to work."

Squall looks down at the appliance. Somehow, he has managed to disassemble it nearly completely. It's cheaply made, the pieces plastic, all snap-together components. Rebuilding it takes him nearly no time at all, too many years of weapons training coming back in full-force.

Ellone touches his shoulder. "It'll be okay," she says again, gently, and Squall sincerely hopes that she isn't lying to him.

_xx_

Someone knocks on the door to Xu's temporary office gingerly.

"Come in," Xu snaps, clicking out of the personnel database on her computer.

Nida enters. "I found something you should see."

Xu looks up at him from over the rims of her glasses. Her contacts were lost in the bombing; it pisses her off to not have them, but the optometrist in Balamb says it'll be at least a week before they can get new lenses in. "It's from one of the cameras that got knocked off the wall in the TC. There's some footage Intel thought you might want to see." Nida hands her a flash drive, and Xu plugs it into her laptop.

She watches the footage once, her brow furrowed, and when the screen fuzzes out into a blur of static, she clicks the play button again.

"How come no one found this earlier?"

"It's from three in the morning. No one really looked at the tapes the first time around, I don't think."

"No one else but Intel knows about this?"

Nida shrugs. "Not that I'm aware of."

Xu ejects the drive, and sticks it in her pocket. "Thanks," she says, and Nida nods.

"You should sleep," he adds. "This can wait until the morning."

Xu shakes her head. "You know how fast things get out of control, Nida. I'm not even sure what I've got here, and I can't take any chances."

"Look, I know you're worried sick about this. But Quistis is smart. She can handle herself."

Xu takes off her glasses, and rubs the heels of her hands against her eyes wearily. Theoretically, he's right. Quistis is smart, she is capable, she _can _recognize when a situation's going to hell, but at the same time... she's changed, more distracted, unfocused. Even her casting abilities are different. Xu's gone over the logs a hundred times; Quistis hasn't junctioned a GF since she lost Shiva.

She hasn't needed to, it seems.

Xu knows the theory, of course. She took Quistis' class on the evolution of magic and casting, but an _idiot _could make the leap in logic after being in proximity to a sorceress like Rinoa Leonhart for so many years. Garden is already in shambles from just _rumors_ of witches.

She touches the outline of the thumb drive in her pocket.

"C'mon," Nida says. "Get some sleep."


	8. eight

_eight_

Quistis is working in the cafeteria, sorting out the books salvaged from the library, when Xu approaches her.

"Commander," she says, flipping through an old Junction Theory textbook. The pages fall out in the center; the glue is shot. She pitches the book in the trash. "What can I do for you?"

Xu picks up a soot-stained dictionary, running her thumb across the cover. "This is something the cadets should be doing," she comments. "Let's go get a coffee."

There's a set of encyclopedias that can be saved; Quistis passes the entire stack off to a SeeD waiting nearby. "Reference," she instructs. She knows Xu is still waiting for an answer. "Is that an order?"

"Quistis... Don't be like that."

"Be like what?" Quistis asks, going through a handful of Pupurun graphic novels. The pages are stuck together in most of them- she can practically hear Zell's moan of despair as she throws them all out. "Angry? Because that's going to be kind of hard to stop."

"For god's sake, you sound _exactly _like Almasy," Xu snaps. "And yeah, that was an order, Instructor. Coffee. Now."

Quistis wipes the soot on her hands off onto her jeans and follows Xu out of the caf.

The Instructors' lounge is untouched by the bombings, and currently empty- there isn't much to do when the cadets have been evacuated to other facilities. Xu sets the coffee pot to percolating. Quistis drops into one of the cushy chairs, and after a few minutes, Xu hands her a cup.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Xu asks without preamble. "Don't you think I should've been _told _that you can decimate a Rex without being junctioned?"

Quistis stops, her coffee cup halfway to her lips. "I beg your pardon?"

"There's a video. From the TC. The logs say that you were the only one who was there."

"There's no video."

"Yes," Xu says. "There is." She sips her coffee. "Now, I need to know what's going on. I have to look out for the interests of Garden. I can't have something so dangerous-"

"Something?" The laugh comes out of her before she can stop it. "I'm a thing?"

Xu sighs. "That's not what I meant-"

Quistis sets down her cup hard on the table. Coffee splashes over the rim, making a dark puddle against the white plastic. "That's exactly what you meant. You haven't exactly made your feelings about Rinoa a secret; it's no wonder you'd think the same thing of me."

(_burn the witch burn the witch_)

"Look, Quistis-" and Xu stands, carrying her mug back to the pot. "I know how stressed out you are. Anyone would be, after what you've been through. And I'm sure Almasy told you what I said-"

"You think I care about _that_? You've hated him our entire lives-"

"_But_, I have an obligation to the people in Garden. I need to protect them, and if you and Rinoa have some... secret... that will put this place at further risk, _I need to know_."

_(the succession)_

She stares into the depths of her coffee. "So you can lock me up? Chain me with Odine metal and drop me on a deserted island somewhere where I can't hurt anyone? Burn me at the stake?" There is a chip in the mug, a tiny nick near the rim. She can see the edges of it clearly, trace the microscopic fragments.

"There are procedures in place- Leonhart had something made in Deep Sea. A cure, he claims. We could try it."

(_always_)

"I'm not a sorceress," she says.

"Dammit, Quistis- I'm just trying to help you!"

(_burnthewitch-_)

The cup sails across the room, into the wall, exploding in a shower of ceramic and coffee. Quistis is on her feet and her heartbeat is thunder in her ears.

Xu is staring at her. "What the hell is your problem?"

She is in Xu's face instantly, fury bubbling up from within her, penning her commander in with a grip on the counter that causes the plastic to give under her fingers. "I am _not_," she says carefully, enunciating every word, "a _witch_."

Garden is too narrow, too crowded, too full of _thou shalt nots_, and her head is pounding by the time she makes it out of the lobby, into the bright clear day.

_xx_

She fiddles with the clasp on the Odine bangle, tracing her nail along the seal. The energy running through it is sharp, bitter, electrical. It leaves a bitter taste in her mouth, something no amount of toothpaste can wash away.

Inside of her, an impossibility is growing.

Rinoa touches her belly instinctively, pressing against the taut skin. She cannot fathom what she will look like in nine months (_eight and a half, _she reminds herself, if she lasts that long.)

She needs to get this damn bracelet off, just to make sure.

-_she attacks, a relentless assault of Draw magic, pulling all of Quistis _into _her. There is not enough room, not enough, and when the gaping void opens up, sucking down Shiva and Quistis and Rinoa, the power explodes out of her-_

She hasn't told Squall what happened, but he knows. He has to know. They have poked and prodded and invaded every facet of her, and-

(they trap her in irons)

she cannot perform a single Float spell properly. The power is still there, she knows, humming beneath the surface of her skin, but it's like it's just out of reach. She wants it- she _needs _it, if she's being honest.

But it will not come to her, not even before the bangle was locked onto her wrist.

"Hey," Squall calls, opening the door to the lavish set of rooms they occupy in the presidential palace. She envies him, how he can sound so normal.

"In here," she replies, and he walks into what they've dubbed the sitting room, a space occupied with nothing but big, overstuffed chairs and a television that takes up almost an entire wall.

He enters.

"How's Ellone?"

"Fine," Squall says, dropping in the chair across from her, kicking off his shoes. "She says hi."

The silence between them is not easy, not today, and she stares out the window. The Estharian skyline is bizarre, bulbous, surreal. It's an artist's demented dream, and she is watching it from a glass palace on a hill.

She doesn't have to ask if Squall told Ellone, because she can read it all over his face, in his body language, in the way he looks at her. In the way she feels him, hovering around the edges, not nearly as close as he used to be.

"You don't have to go through with this," he says finally, awkwardly, shifting in his chair.

She reaches for the window, traces the outline of a spire in the distance, her finger leaving a smudge on the glass. "I'm pregnant," she says. "It's not the end of the world."

_xx_

They come out of nowhere, once she locks her car and starts for the apartment building. She is not their first target, she knows, but she happens to be the first SeeD they've come across tonight.

There are at least seven of them. Armed, by the sounds of guns cocking and the clink of knives. Cheap steel, guns bought from rundown stores in Deling City where they don't ask for much beyond proof of age. The kind of weapons she expects from a group of thugs, whose most deadly weapons are bombs built from plans they downloaded off of the internet.

(_They've done plenty of damage to Garden_, her constant companion whispers. _Plenty of damage to your loved ones._)

"Hey, aren't you that Instructor chick?" one calls. "The famous one."

"I think it might be," chimes in another. "Pretty lady."

There's a round of laughter, echoing through the empty streets. Darkness is falling, and she's getting the feeling that these guys have seen too many movies. She shifts, subtly, adjusting her weight and shaking out her hands, counting the voices that join in the angry mirth.

Eight, she decides, and knows she is right. Everything is so _clear_; overhead, a gull cries out the end of the day, and one of her assailants clicks off the safety on his gun.

"She was hotter on TV," another decides.

Someone steps forward, grabbing at her arm, and that's all it takes. She lunges, ramming the heel of her hand into a nose, her knee into a ribcage. There is swearing, and the sound of bones breaking.

A man comes at her with a knife. She disarms him, uses his weight against him, slams him on the ground with her forearm crushing against his trachea. He curls up, fetal, gasping for breath, clawing at his throat.

Three left.

Someone shoots at her, and she feels the impact, a hot streak against her shoulder. Quistis ducks, avoids another shot, slips in under the man's arms like a lover and wrenches his head to the side. The snap is sickening, and he drops.

(_Now_.)

The last two approach, warily, weapons raised against her, and she watches them, chest heaving, hair hanging in her face. One of them has a trash can lid of all things, held out in front of him like a shield.

Perfect.

The magic explodes out of her, lethal chains of lightning, everything Thundaga aspires to be. It hits the lid first, rocketing through its owner, and she can see right down to his skeleton before he is a pile of ash.

His friend fares no better, and when the spots fade from her eyes, Quistis is alone.

She whirls, slowly. There are no corpses, no weapons, just the stink of burnt flesh in the evening air and the sound of sirens in the distance.

(_Good_.)

_xx_

Seifer opens the door to dump a bag of trash just as Quistis has her key out to put it in the lock. "Hi," he says in surprise. "You're home early."

She pushes past him, dropping her coat on the table and going immediately for the cabinets above the sink, pulling out filters and a mug. Seifer shrugs, and crosses the hall, tossing the bag down the trash chute. When he reenters, the coffee pot is burbling.

She's standing in front of the counter, staring at the wall, her hands white-knuckled against the fake marble.

"What's wrong?"

Quistis shakes her head. "Nothing." Her voice is hollow.

Seifer comes up behind her, reaching to touch her shoulder, and she stiffens, jerking away. He stops.

"Sorry," she says. "Just- sorry."

"Okay," he replies, confused. He steps back, watching her carefully as she fills a mug with hot coffee, drinking half of it in three long gulps. When she sets the mug down, it rattles against the counter, and he can see that her hands are shaking.


	9. nine

_nine_

_four weeks later. _

This is how Xu believes war should be:

The gushing red of arterial blood, the fallen head of a comrade, lopped off of stalwart shoulders, the sightless eyes looking up from her from where it has rolled to a stop in a puddle of mud, asking the eternal question, _is this it_?

This is the bitter reality of it:

There is the hulking, half-patched ruin of Balamb Garden, no time to repair things beyond some sheets of plywood and roll upon roll of duct tape. She boasts the best corps of engineers, and all she has to show for it is a spiderweb of silver sticky tape crossing all over Garden's hull.

Endless funerals. Endless caskets filled with bodies missing limbs and thick metal jars of cremated ash poured out into the sea in a sailor's burial. She sees a hundred reports a day from Dr. Kadowaki, advising her of medical discharges and therapy sessions with practitioners more experienced than she. The psych ward at Balamb General is more of a field hospital now.

She doesn't sleep much, her life an endless rote of orders and schematics, dispatching troops and withdrawing them. Galbadia's army is small but vicious, and holds grudges in the name of countless generations. They have never liked Garden, and especially not Balamb, the loins from which their worst nightmare spawned. The spark of rebellion is enough to set them off against their enemy, a fact that is altogether too obvious now. This is what happens when she goes digging for answers, asking the right questions and getting nothing but trouble and unending death threats.

When she finds an hour here and five minutes there to spend in her bunk, her eyes slip closed and she sees the screaming steel of an honest-to-god bayonet running through her thigh, leaving her helpless and having to be airlifted out of an alleyway in Deling, her hands clamped over the wound as bright hot arterial blood seeps out beneath her. The wound is half-healed and she walks with a cane now, will have to for weeks, if not months. It's embarrassing, really.

Nida finds her when he has time, and their relationship is a sixty-second neck massage and a harried tryst in the command suite's bathroom, of all places, making her feel like she's a cadet again and he's her first boyfriend, all awkward movements and bumping limbs, a last-ditch effort at reconnecting, just to make sure they're still alive.

There just isn't time for a normal life anymore, and she isn't even counting the fact that there is still a sorceress and her knight out there, waiting, waiting, waiting.

This new war is very exhausting, indeed.

_xx_

It's not a good day.

Seifer eases himself down on the edge of the bed, its hideous floral bedspread only slightly more tolerable in the darkness, and touches her face gently. Her skin is cool, too cold to the touch, and he smooths her hair back away from her face.

"Hey," he says, and Quistis slides open her eyes, just enough of a sliver to stare up at him. "You have to call in."

"You do it," she murmurs, and rolls away from his hand, drawing up the covers until she is little more than a mop of tangled hair and the curve of an ear.

"You know Xu won't believe me," he says, and even he can hear the strain and frustration in his voice. This is a never-ending battle between them, and he's out of patience with it. It pisses him off. He grabs her phone off of the glossy wooden nightstand, and dials the commander's direct line for her, balancing the phone against her ear until Quistis sighs and takes it, her fingers milk-pale against the black casing.

They have been in Deling City for several weeks now, and it's starting to feel like they've burned some serious bridges, rather than Quistis calling in every last bit of her medical and emergency leave time for a "necessary separation" from Garden. They are watched, of course, all the time. Only an idiot would miss the SeeDs in civvies, eying him at the coffee shop or coincidentally browsing the same aisle of the bodega at the corner of the block, practically stalking him as he picks out bagels and quarts of milk and a box of aspirin.

Galbadia has changed practically overnight, turning from lukewarm tolerance of Balamb and Garden in general to starting fights in the street with anyone who even _looks _like SeeD. A civil war has come to town, and when they leave the hotel suite, it is, by necessity, in disguise. Quistis makes an interesting brunette. The false beard he's acquired itches like a motherfucker.

Most of the time, he finds himself bored out of his skull, playing endless rounds of solitaire on Quistis' computer and watching more daytime television than one man should possibly be able to consume. He's started doing the crossword puzzle in the fucking _Deling Times_, just to keep himself occupied. One more week in this room, and he might have to take up arms and join the fighting himself, just for something to _do. _

Quistis snaps the phone shut, an overly loud click in the silence, and drops it back over her shoulder. She's been sleeping an awful lot lately, and when she's awake, she's moody, irritable, more liable to bitch at him about something stupid like leaving his shaving cream on the edge of the sink instead of putting it in the cabinet. It's a _hotel_, he tells her, there's an entire cleaning staff just waiting to scrub a rust-ring off of stark white porcelain the second they check out.

Sometimes, though, for days on end, Quistis is startlingly clear, aware of everything, staring at him like she can hear every thought he's ever had or is going to have- and she _can_, he knows; he feels her probing around the edge of his mind, slipping into crevices he'd rather she left untouched. She doesn't sleep during those times, standing at the window and staring down at the streets like the hurried walk of DC residents herded like rats in their own city will tell her something that she doesn't already know.

Her marks are spreading, cascading down her throat and across her collarbone, faint blue trails that look like runes in the right lighting. She's getting stronger; when she touches him, her fingers are slender bands of steel, capable of crushing his throat with the wrong movement.

"I'm going for a walk," he announces, and she makes no indication that she's heard him at all.

He takes a few minutes in the bathroom to glue on the beard, smoothing it around his jaw and yanking a knit hat over his shorn hair. It's already starting to grow back, bright blond tendrils creeping down and tickling the back of his neck. The beard is just dark enough to look natural without having to do something stupid like dyeing his eyebrows, and by the time he finishes smearing concealer over the faded ridge of his scar, he looks like a different person.

_That's the idea, jackass_.

He shrugs on his coat, a bland black trench coat that looks exactly like what every other Galbadian hipster asshole is wearing, only it's cut just enough to hide the bulge of a shoulder holster that he's conveniently "forgotten" to return to Garden's weapons storage. He's unlicensed for concealed carrying, but he doesn't give a shit. Seifer double checks to make sure he's got their room key, his wallet, and a few extra rounds in a secret inner pocket.

He sticks a knife into his boot, and walks out into the hallway, head down, collar up.

War in Deling City is really business as usual, only with more hidden bombs and soldiers who make no attempt to hide their distaste of the entire situation camped out on street corners, glaring at anyone who looks at them askance.

Seifer has seen people shot for less than looking, and hell, he's decapitated people with Hyperion for doing less than that. The entire thing has an air of deja vu about it. He's actually fairly surprised Xu hasn't ordered Quistis back to a safer proximity. The natives are restless and this is the worst place they could be, hiding out in the thick of things.

Probably, Commander Bitch wants her out here, close to enemy headquarters, in the event Quistis _does _go insane and slaughters everyone in a fifty-mile radius. It would be so beneficial, not having to sacrifice another platoon of SeeDs when one mage can take care of it all.

-_endless_ fucking nightmares of it playing out _just like that_, with Quistis as the vengeful angel of ruin and destruction, and her body ridden with holes as they open fire on her-

He stalks down the street, ignoring an interchangeable group of protesters who just want to let people know that _SeeDs Are Murderers, _and, _Garden Harbors Sorceresses_. Because, really, when it comes to slogans, no one's particularly original these days. And he's pretty sure those are the same signs from like, eight years ago, probably dug up in someone's basement. He's seen them before, back when Squall was in charge and Rinoa was the deceptively pretty face by his side, until someone leaked the secret.

There's only so long that much hatred for one person can boil before it overflows, especially when the public cried out for Rinoa's head and Garden sent them away to Esthar instead, to live peacefully like civilians.

_Garden isn't even harboring sorceresses anymore, you ignorant fucks, they've thrown them all out_, he wants to scream as he stalks by the protesters, but he keeps his mouth shut and his feet moving ceaselessly forward. Soldiers are already moving in to break up the protest before he even makes it to the bar. He enters, letting the door slam shut behind him, muffling the cries of indignation from down the street, and orders a beer. He tosses a handful of gil onto the counter in exchange, then carries the mug to a table in the very farthest corner, where he can drink in relative shadow and silence.

She's already waiting for him, bundled up like a kid against the cold. Winter doesn't leave lightly from Deling City, and everyone's still in coats and scarves up to the eyes. Seifer very nearly draws and shoots her before he realizes who it is.

"The hell are you doing here?"

Fujin sips her whiskey and looks at him like he hasn't said a thing. "Checking in," she says mildly. "Was in town."

_In town_ can mean anything these days- planting explosives at a G. Army hotspot, a diplomatic emissary to G. Garden, visiting friends, potential targets, enemies. Idly, he wonders how many people she's killed today, but it isn't a question worth asking.

He drinks. The first sip of beer leaves a cold searing in his throat, and the second soothes it like a balm.

"How is she?"

It is his turn to feign deaf, but Fujin is patient, watching him over the rim of her glass as she sips her drink. Seifer sighs, curling his hands around the frosty curve of the mug in front of him.

"Not good," he admits. "She's fighting it, but..."

Fujin nods.

"She barely talks. She just... looks at me." The words are hard to get out, harder than he would have thought. He stares down at the amber of his beer. "It's coming, Fuj."

The beast under the bed, the thing of all his nightmares, the witching hour of the night. The monster that wears his mother's face, slipping on a different mask this time. The cure Squall disappeared for days for is bullshit, leaving only three raised lumps at the injection sites and Quistis shaking and throwing up ceaselessly for forty-eight hours like she was detoxing from something.

It might've worked on Rinoa, on a Sorceress in the traditional sense of the word, but no one knows quite what to make of Quistis, and Xu can't hold her on charges of being one, not when everyone _knows _there can't be more than one sorceress at one time. They have Rinoa on tape, back when Quistis came back, admitting that she can still feel the power in her veins, even if she can't use it. That's enough to prove she's still a witch, according to Garden legislature.

He drinks, and when the mug is empty, Fujin buys them both another round.

_xx_

Rinoa runs her hands over the very subtle curve of her belly, even though she knows it's too early for something to kick, to prod at her touch.

It is a moment of weakness, and she goes back to sorting through the piles of baby clothes. She hasn't had any sort of shower or celebration- everyone left that she was friends with at Garden have sent care packages in the mail. There's no time for parties anymore, not for outcasts and heathens. Laguna has even done his best to quash any potential press releases.

Quistis sends a card, something trite and flowery that looks like it was found in the checkout line of a grocery store, and Rinoa has few doubts that Seifer was probably tasked with picking it out. Her friend's handwriting is slanted and rushed, a quick note scrawled across the bottom, leaving out all the things Rinoa needs to know. There's a hundred gil gift card to a popular baby boutique enclosed, as if that makes up for the secrets and the lies and the silence from Squall on what he's been able to glean from Garden.

This child will be born without fanfare, in secret.

In the other room, she can hear Squall, his voice pitched low as he talks to Kiros about the situation between Galbadia and Balamb. Ever since B. Garden rooted out the nest of rebels that claimed responsibility for the bombings, things have escalated. Fingers have been pointed, political agendas uncovered, tabloid media exploding with spectacle and speculation alike. SeeD is reviled, made out to be the bad guys in a world rife with monsters.

Every night, Squall watches the news like a man possessed, waiting on tenterhooks for the body count to be announced. She's just grateful he doesn't have to put on steel-toed boots and battle leathers to march back into the fray. He is here, he is civilian, he will get his taste of bloodshed secondhand from glossy newscasters.

Her pinwheel is buried in a lock box somewhere in one of the closets. She doesn't care to look at it again, and _she _cannot be involved, not anymore than she is, because the blame will always come back around to her, to her magic, to her very being. She is committing the ultimate sin in the eyes of the world by simply being pregnant. No one knows what will come from her loins, what untold nightmares her child will bring, even though she has tried _so _hard to be good.

Garden sent her away because she hadn't spilled any blood. If she were a murderess, they would have killed her, she knows. Edea was a special case, the wife of Garden's founder. They couldn't kill _her. _Executing Edea would've been akin to chopping off their own limbs.

But Cid is dead now, unable to sway a council in its decision, and Rinoa knows if they tried her again, someone would find some way of making sure she made it in front of a firing squad.

_xx_

When she finally wakes up, she is trapped in the cloying darkness, and her first instinct is to cry out.

Her lover's name hangs in the silence and the solitude, and no noble knight rushes to her aid.

She is alone.

_Alone_.

The thought terrifies her like there is a little girl with her hands locked around Quistis' throat, like there is a snake-silken voice whispering in her ear_, the succession always kontinues_-

Quistis hurls aside the blanket and fumbles for the switch on the bedside lamp. The room comes into sharp relief, all harsh angles and uncomfortable, bland furniture. It does little to slow her racing heart. The dream clings to her, an unwanted coat.

She licks her dry, cracking lips, calls again. "Seifer?"

There is still no answer.

The room is too small, collapsing in on itself even as she sits here, working her way from abject panic to the controlled breathing of a soldier who knows what she's doing. She will be the first to admit that she's falling apart, losing a grasp on reality that has turned out to be tenuous at best.

There is only the voice, whispering honey-on-fire in her ear. There is only the raw, ceaseless power, pulsing, a lightning strike with every synapse fired in her brain. There is only Seifer, endlessly Seifer, his fear and loathing and utter devotion and every single dream he has had for the past endless weeks playing out on a loop.

He will follow her into the fire, without question, and he will burn the world down for her.

God, she cannot _breathe_ in here.

Quistis gets up and gets dressed, buttoning her jeans with hands that tremble just slightly. Her hair is a gnarled mess; she gives up with the brush and pulls the whole thing back in a hasty, messy knot. It needs re-dyeing, and brown does not suit her.

She cakes her face with makeup, and when she's done, she simply looks pale, weary, unfinished.

The door to the room clicks shut behind her with all the force of a gunshot.


	10. ten

_ten_

It took Galbadia exactly four days to declare war on Balamb Garden, and Squall still cannot reconcile with the fact that, now, weeks later, what he is watching on the television is, in fact, the sleepy peaceful town of Balamb, burning.

It is the image that haunts him even as Laguna turns off the television, the flames lingering behind his eyes like the flashburn of a camera flare. He will never be able to un-see this. He will-

"Squall-"

It is his father's choked voice that makes Squall realize that the edge of Laguna's desk has come away in pieces under his white-knuckled hands. He stares down at the hunk of lacquered wood and, somewhere, numbly, feels the sting of rough edges biting into his skin.

Balamb is _burning_, and he isn't _there, _he can't save it.

He should be in black leather, whirling like a dervish among Galbadian soldiers, separating limbs from bodies, poison-fused bullets decimating men's torsos in ways that he has carefully schooled himself out of remembering. He should be spattered with gore and sweat and in a wheeling dance with the enemy.

Instead, people are dying. Ma Dincht might be dead. Zell is probably out there, hurling himself into the fray, a man possessed regardless of his honorable discharge, the very carefully crafted terms of his contract allowing him to be drawn back into battle at any time, one good hand or not.

They will need all available bodies to the front line.

He should _be _there.

"Squall," his father says again, and he wonders just how long Laguna has been repeating that word. He looks up, to a point just over the president's shoulder, at the peaceful skyline of Esthar.

Seifer and Quistis are undoubtedly somewhere in the middle of the bloodshed, escaped to Deling City under the pretense of leave time.

-_he has a perfectly clear mental image of Quistis ripping out a man's throat with her bare hands, pretty, pristine nails grabbing hold of taut vocal cords and silencing a scream that would've gotten them all caught if anyone had heard the alarm-_

Instead, he is here, in a stupid ill-fitting suit because Laguna has asked him to take over some security responsibilities, just for something to pass the goddamned time. The knot in his tie is a noose- Squall tears at it, fumbling with the loops of cloth until he has it free, yanking it off from around his collar and flinging it onto the ground.

"I need to go home," he says, and his voice is hollow.

"You can't," Laguna tells him, and who _is _this man, this absentee father he has only barely begun to trust, and only because of a stupid war that was started just like this one, with a sorceress and a princess and a band of soldiers.

He sets the fragment of wood onto a less damaged part of the desk. "I need to go there," he repeats, carefully, like he is talking to a child. There is something horrible thudding in his ears, a whistling scream of a missile blast that will, if he's lucky, leave him dead where he stands.

It takes him a moment to realize that it's his heart, hammering wildly out of control, just like the afterimage of Balamb on fire.

"You have to stay here. For Rinoa's sake. For your _child_'s sake," Laguna implores, and maybe on a man not bred as a soldier from day one of what life he can remember, this argument would work.

"I _have to go_." His heartbeat is so loud, he has to shout to be heard over it.

Laguna rises halfway out of his seat, and his tone is begging. "I don't know if I can protect her if you leave, Squall."

But he is already standing, crashing the chair he has been sitting in back against the floor. Kiros and Ward rush in at the commotion, and Squall shoves past them.

He has to go _home. _

_xx_

The streets are emptying out, Quistis realizes with a start, just as it begins to rain. When she'd left the hotel, the sidewalks were much more crowded than she had expected. She thought everyone would be hiding out in their homes, not going about their business.

Quistis stops mid-stride, squinting up through her rain streaked glasses at the street signs. She's been walking for a long time, ignored by the people all around her, not paying much attention to the twists and turns she has taken, shortcuts through alleyways, crossing through neighborhoods that only seem to get more derelict as she walks.

And now she has no idea where she is. Great. She ducks underneath the overhang of a shop with its _Closed_ sign already flickering in the window.

This has been happening a lot lately, these absent slips, where she doesn't know what happened to minutes or hours or days. She blames the sleep, the long endless oh god _wake up Quistis_ hours that she spends with her eyes shut, and the even longer days, where reality shifts and bends and she can spend thirty minutes staring into the micro fridge in their hotel suite and not remember why she opened the door.

How long has she been out here, anyway?

Quistis digs in her pocket for her phone, and comes up empty, swearing under her breath when she discovers that she is entirely without wallet, phone or key.

Or weapons, but, really, that isn't a problem anymore.

She closes her eyes, and reaches, seeking out the persistent thud-_thud_ that is Seifer Almasy's heartbeat, the only thing she knows, the only thing that is constant now.

She has never tried to find him from this far away. There has never been a reason. She supposes she could go into any number of little cafes and bodegas, pick up a pay phone and dial a number she knows by heart, but it brings her back to the part where she has left her wallet like a stupid, amateur_ rookie_ in their hotel room, when a quick foray into her pockets has her coming up only with lint.

She furrows her brow, only distantly aware of how she must look, leaning against this rotting hulk of a building with her eyes closed (just another crazy person in a crazy city), when the taser hits her in the chest.

She sees a galaxy exploding behind her eyes, and as she drops, she can hear the faint thrum of Seifer's heart, and the sound swells and grows and expands until it is louder than the electricity buzzing through her body, louder than the shocked cries of onlookers as she drops, louder than the voices around her, _pick her up_, _get her out of here_, and she is spasming and twitching and the heartbeat explodes into nothing.

_xx_

Something is wrong here. Seifer knows it before he even slides the card key in the lock.

Quistis' things are still sitting in a neat pile on the table by the door, her fake wallet with her fake ID, her room key, her heavily encrypted phone that looks exactly like every other phone on the planet except for the fact that she can call the highest levels of Garden and never be traced.

She isn't here.

His stomach drops.

The bedroom is empty, but he checks it anyway, ripping away the balled up comforter _just in case_ she has squeezed herself somewhere down beneath it, blocking out the whole damn world with a floral-print shield.

Seifer comes up empty-handed, and it feels like his heart is trying to make an escape out of his throat.

She's _gone_.

He hits the hallway at a dead run.

_xx_

_wake-up-wake-up-wake-up little quistis trepe. _

She sees fire and brimstone and the beach of her childhood,

gulls freewheeling overhead, screaming out their taunts to

the end of the day. She sees a blond boy with bright green

eyes, who kicks over a sandcastle a blonde girl has spent so

many hours carefully constructing. She sees the boy grow

into a man, sees the man shift into a lap dog, sees the lap

dog turn into a shell of a man that comes to her without

a valid reason on his lips, a man she can barely touch

and then cannot live without, and she sees the shell

slowly fill back up with life and she _hates him for it_.

_wake-_up_-wake-_UP_, little quistis trepe, because this is reality and the dream is something you've been living for far too long._

no, she doesn't _hate_ him, she can't hate him, she

has never hated him, not even when he broke her

nose or when she wrapped Save the Queen around

his leg, leaving a leather burned and barbed scar in his

flesh. she cannot hate him. she _will _not hate him.

this is the monster in her head, she knows, the

one that waits underneath her skin and whose

claws and teeth go snicker-snack.

_WAKE-UP-WAKE-UP, don't you remember me?_

and behind the golden halo of seifer's hair, she can

see the witch that wears her mother's face.

_**WAKE-UP-WAKE-UP-WAKE-UP.**_

_xx_

_"NO!" _The scream comes tearing out of her lips, spittle flying out and caking around her chin, and Quistis Trepe opens her eyes to the red-tinged world of a microscopic prison cell.


	11. eleven

_eleven_

The sound a body makes when it crashes into brick is a cross between a satisfying _thwack_ and a soft, squishy _thud_, depending on if they're wearing a heavy coat and if you're deliberately going for the head.

He slams the SeeD against the wall, glaring up into eyes that have gone wide with shock and surprise, and, _some goddamned training program_, because Seifer thinks this one might've peed himself a little.

There isn't an answer immediately, mostly because the SeeD is gaping like a fish, and he shoves again, pushing the man against the worn bricks, feeling the pulse of heartbeat on his knuckles.

"_Where_?" he repeats, and the word comes out a roar.

"She- she left. A few hours ago. Going right, then left, and then Jensen picked up her trail."

Seifer tightens his grip on the fistfuls of beige suit coat, and narrows his eyes. "Where the_ fuck_ is Jensen?"

"Thirty-second and B-Branch." The SeeD pulls at Seifer's hands ineffectually, grabbing for thumbs or fingers, something to break; from behind him, Fujin clears her throat mildly.

Seifer snarls, and drops the SeeD, but not before shoving him once more for good measure.

"If you're wrong..." he says, but there's no need to finish the sentence, because the SeeD is already hightailing it out of the narrow alleyway, probably off to make a report to Xu or change his pants. Or both.

"Weak," Fujin comments, watching him go, but Seifer only snarls in agreement and stalks out of the alley, feeling the adrenaline beating through his veins, a heartbeat, a woman's scream, her voice whispering his name in the dark-

_xx_

Her back hurts, and she can smell the coppery tang of blood. Somewhere behind her, there is the _drip drop drip _of something wet, hitting the cold metal floor.

Her shoes are missing, she realizes distantly, curling her toes up under the balls of her feet. _They don't want you to run_.

-_she isn't the one-_

The voice echoes through, tinnily, broadcast from somewhere very far away. She lifts her head and tilts her ear and tries to catch the rest of the sentence, but the words come through murkily.

There is a needle in her arm, held down with a pristine white _X _of medical tape, and she traces the line coming out of it up, up, up, to where it loops through a narrow hole in the wall and disappears. The fluid running through it is blue, like a cure spell.

(_Pretty_, whispers a little-girl voice at the back of her mind. _Pretty, look at the fireworks, isn't it pretty-, _she says, and her burnt-blonde hair is bound up in pigtails, streaming in the wind coming off of the sea as she points up in the sky. _Look how pretty it is._)

That first horrible moment of panic has already ebbed and gone, roaring away on the wave of the stuff they're running through her- she cannot _think_, cannot make sense of this, cannot _understand_.

_Sei-_

The word hangs on her lips, distant, dusty, hard to recall.

_-how do you expect me to tell the difference, they look _alike_-_

_-i gave you a _picture_, how do you explain the-_

Her eyes roll up, to the side, toward that little hole that the tube runs through. The voices are angry, terse, a male and a female with a crisp accent she thinks might be Estharian.

There are bands of thick nylon across her chest and her arms, their rough sides biting into her forearms when she tries to lift her hands _(there is no escape, no escape). _

She flexes against the low back of the chair, feeling where it bites into the center of her spine. Something rustles behind her, and the pain in her shoulders intensifies for one white-hot flare of a second, and then dissipates. Some brace, then, on her back, some machine that she can't fight against, something ground into her skin.

The word word word, what is the _word_-

-_fer_

She makes a fist, digging her nails into her palms, trying to work past the feeling of cotton wrapped around her brain. _Cure_, she thinks, as hard as she can, digging within her for that reservoir of power, _cure, curecurecuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuure-_

_Sei-_

It surges up from within her, and stalls out halfway through her chest.

_No. _

She tries again.

The spell stops, splinters apart, the shards blowing away to places unknown.

_Nononono-_

There is the sound of footsteps, coming from the direction of the voices, of the wires, of the tiny hole in the wall. One-two-three-four-five-six-

_-fer_

it takes them seventeen paces to get to the door directly in front of her, and she stares at it, narrowing her eyes in concentration, because this is it, this is her _one chance_, she has to get out of here, what do they _want_-

A clinking, scraping of metal, and the door unlocks, swinging open widely, revealing a short woman in a white lab coat, with a face that looks vaguely familiar.

"Hello," she says, and it is the same woman, her voice the clipped, accented Estharian tone that is so, _so _familiar- _a clown collar and a machine? _ "How are you doing, Rinoa?"

The name weeds through the clouds around her mind and strikes a chord.

_Wake up, wake up_, _that's not your name, is it?_

_That's not my name-_

_That's not-_

And from behind her comes the rustling again, the tug of weight on her shoulderblades, and it sounds like feathers.

_xx_

_seifer-seifer-seifer_

It slams into him, a train to his chest, and he has to stop in the middle of the street, amidst a cacophony of horns and shouts, his breath coming in short, tight wheezes- _no no no, not my name not my name notmyname, _an icy balm of a spell stuttering out and the copper taste of blood-

"Seifer!" Fujin's voice, a shout, distant, coming from forever away, and she is pulling his arm, dragging him out of the street and to the safety of the curb, where he sits down hard on the concrete.

_In, out, in, out, in, out-_

It is like swallowing a blizzaga, a frigid bomb shoved down his throat that will blow up at any second if he can't start fucking _breathing-_

-look, look, isn't it pretty, seifer, aren't they pretty fireworks-

_-the adult in you is telling you to back off-_

Inhale: a room, concrete, tiny, bars everywhere, metal glinting with peculiar silver.

Exhale: a woman with a fox-face and something blue, everywhere, blue.


	12. twelve

_twelve_

Something is different when she opens her eyes. Things are clearer, sharper... more _there_ than they were when she went to sleep a couple of hours ago.

Rinoa straightens up in the recliner she had fallen asleep in, raising a hand to her eyes, rubbing out sleep crud out of the left, then the right. Her nap seems to have alleviated most of her nausea, for now, at least. That is a pleasant surprise.

There is a glint of silver on the table next to her, and Rinoa turns, carefully, feeling like the world is fresh, new-made, and it makes her a little dizzy. The shine turns out to be a fat silver bracelet, one she recognizes as Squall's present to her from a trip to Timber years and years ago.

There is a pristine square of palace stationary tucked beneath it.

_Wear this_.

Squall's handwriting is a scrawl, loose, fast, as if he can't bear to waste time properly forming letters. Rinoa picks up the bangle, and something about the movement makes her stop. There is no whisper of metal against her own skin.

She stretches her arm out in front of her, studying it carefully. Her wrist is bare. The Odine bangle is _gone_, leaving little more evidence that it was ever there than just a pale circle of skin.

Laughter burbles up from within her, and spills over her lips before she can quite control it.

-_the scratching of metal against metal, the grunt of a man's voice, the feeling of peace and freedom and _rinoarinoarinoa-

She slips the untrue bangle on her wrist and chases the sound of a heartbeat, her name, his voice, out of the room, down the stairs.

_xx_

Xu stares at her computer screen for a very long time before she can even quite process what she's seeing. The photos are crisply rendered, perfectly centered, and the woman's face that stares at her from them is _not _Rinoa Heartilly, no matter what the accompanying letter might claim.

She has spent too many hours in company with this face, and not so long ago, she would claim she knew it better than her own.

The words are stark black text that mock her- _we have your sorceress, we will kill her. _There is a list of demands, standard ones, money, power, a formal apology by SeeD for wrongs done to people she doesn't remember, names that mean absolutely nothing to her.

It doesn't matter. Someone, someone does not know the difference between Rinoa Heartilly and Quistis Trepe- Xu would tear down Galbadia brick by brick for only one of them.

She is up and hobbling out of her office, her phone out, and completely ignores the diplomatic emissary from Trabia sitting in the waiting room as she jabs her thumb against the call button for the elevator repeatedly.

Somewhere above the grinding clatter of the elevator, the emissary's insistent request that they must talk, _right now_, Xu is aware that her phone is ringing. When she looks down at the display, _Leonhart, Squall_ is calling her.

_xx_

She startles the shit out of him, appearing like a ghost.

"Squall," she says, and he jerks his head up, slamming it against the bottom of the steering column. The motion is enough to get a spark going in the wires in his hands, and the engine roars to life.

He twists himself upright in the seat, rubbing his head. His wife is sitting next to him; he hadn't even heard the door open, but here she is, in a soft printed-cotton sundress and her hair in long, loose waves around her face. Her hands are folded in her lap, below the bump of her belly, and when she speaks, her voice is urgent.

"You're not going alone."

Somewhere in the presidential palace, a klaxon goes off, blaring through the corridors and right down to the garage. That would be Kiros, then, noticing for the first time that the lockbox he keeps not-so-cleverly hidden in his desk has been picked open, that the special key for the Odine bangle is missing, and burns white-hot-cold in Squall's pocket now.

There is no time to argue, because here comes Kiros now, loping around the corner, his eyes narrowed as he scans the garage for the source of the engine idle.

"Squall!" he shouts, jogging . "You don't want to do this. Get out of the car. We can take care of this-"

_Not an option_, Squall thinks, throwing the car into gear and peeling backwards out of the parking space, narrowly avoiding running into the tail of a massive sport utility vehicle. The sedan he has chosen to steal will not handle even a minor impact very well, but it is the least flashy of Laguna's vehicles.

It is also, perhaps, one of the only cars in the garage that can get them to Balamb with the least amount of fuel.

Security is pouring into the garage behind Kiros, guns drawn and yelling for him to _stop, stop right now, or we'll shoot. _

(He has flashbacks of a silver car and a screaming crowd.)

A shot goes off, clipping a concrete pillar to the right, and he instinctively puts his hand on Rinoa's head, pushing her down low in the seat, away from the danger. Someone's going to get fired, shooting at the president's son.

He doesn't let Rinoa sit up until they are clear of the palace, when he finds a bit of late afternoon traffic to lose themselves in. It'll buy them a few minutes, maybe, while the security teams scramble for their cars, and someone reports the situation to his father.

There are sirens behind them now. Squall weaves the car in and out of lanes with a flagrant disregard for his turn signal and the posted speed limit- he has the car at a hundred miles per hour by the time they reach the toll booths out of Esthar. The automated system picks up on the fact that it's a political vehicle before it picks up on the fact that it's a _stolen_ political vehicle, and the light above the gate flicks to green, allowing them passage.

"Xu knows we're coming," Rinoa says finally, and there is nothing in her voice to define the statement- it is a fact she has plucked out of the air, out of his mind. She knows of the thirty-second phone call, placed to the most powerful woman in the private mercenary business right now. Xu knows _he _is coming, yes.

Rinoa, however, is a secret kept, while he announces his intentions to the rest of the world.

He returns his attention to the road, because concentrating on driving means he doesn't have to think too hard about what going home will mean for them.

_xx_

(_Careful, careful now._)

They have left her alone for hours now, but the mad-scientist captor is back, her white labcoat pristine, bright and hard to look straight at. Someone has adjusted whatever is running through the line, just enough that coherent thought is starting to seep back in, and Quistis watches, waits. She has had practice at this, many hours spent being pumped full of truth serums and sedatives, but this drug... This is hard to beat.

"You killed my sister," the woman says conversationally. "Back during the Second War, when you went nuts once. You probably don't remember her. Your pretty husband called it all a tactical error afterward. That they were _deeply sorry_, but there was nothing they could do."

The woman reaches forward, her fingers outstretched, touching Quistis' face analytically. She picks up clumps of dyed-dark hair, drops them back against Quistis' shoulder. There are stinging pains when clinical fingers brush across open wounds, injuries Quistis wasn't even aware of having. Someone might as well have poured straight rubbing alcohol into them now, as they are brought into sharp relief.

"He said, and I remember this distinctly, 'that there was a war going on,' as if it were news to _anyone_." There is a bitter, cynical laugh. "As if that's news to anyone now. There's always a war on."

-startlingly clear image of that press conference, back when they were young and full of idealism and thought they could save the world-

The woman moves her fingers down, down. Quistis' head flicks forward like a snakebite, sinking her teeth into an inch of exposed skin between sleeve and palm.

The woman's scream goes on forever-ever-ever, and she hangs on like a dog to a bone, blood filling her mouth, copper-hot. Her prey is still screaming, yanking at her arm, tearing more flesh free with every pull, and Qusitis shakes her head, just a bit, to the left. This stranger, her captor, stumbles into the intravenous line and the needle rips out of Quistis' wrist.

There is pain, and it is an afterthought, a sensation trying to muddle up through the salty taste of human skin and blood, chasing after the drug still running cold through her veins.

_xx_

The scene in Balamb Garden's hastily-rebuilt Securities center is ripped out of every spy thriller. People are everywhere, crammed shoulder to shoulder at computer terminals, basked in the blue glow of monitors, calling instructions and coordinates across the room. There is a situation in Timber right now, a mission gone awry that has left most of a SeeD team clinging to survival by their fingernails until the calvary arrives. Xu has read over most of the report.

It doesn't matter.

She strongarms one of her soldiers into a full-stop, the man stumbling against her arm and then recovering enough to salute her with a hasty, "Ma'am?"

"Activate Quistis Trepe's beacon," Xu says, ignoring his stammering. "Forward the details to my datapad. I want them in two minutes."

"But, Timber-"

"I don't believe I stuttered," she tells him coldly. "Two minutes."

She is halfway back down the hall when her datapad beeps with a new message. The beacon shows the warehouse district of Deling City, near the northern outskirts. When she zooms in on the map, it gives her a four-block radius and nothing closer. All of the buildings look identical, gray towers with too many windows.

Before Xu can think too terribly hard about what she's doing or why, she forwards the message to _Almasy, Seifer, _and closes out of her email program.

_xx_

The cell door clangs open, and they are no longer alone.

Quistis is aware of three figures before there is a blinding lens-flare of white in her right eye, someone slamming their fist into the side of her head, and her jaw relaxes for just a half-second in shock. It is enough for the woman to yank her arm free, and Quistis spits a chunk of skin, a mouthful of blood and sinew onto the concrete floor. The impact has cleared something in her head, some of the ballast keeping her tethered.

Deep in her chest, something surges up, up, up, up, and she rips her arms up, tearing through nylon weave that by all rights she shouldn't be able to ruin, but there is a siren-scream in her head and a pounding in her veins and she _lunges_.

There is tearing and screaming and an eyeball rolling across the floor. Blood drips in her eyes, and she smears it away with the back of her hand, turning the movement into a backhand that results in the crunching of cartilage as she breaks someone's nose.

The woman is scrambling across the room, clutching her ruined arm, and Quistis grabs her, shoving her against the flat steel of the prison walls.

"My _name_," she hisses, her lips centimeters from the woman's ear, "is Quistis Trepe."

It takes only seven pounds of pressure to break a person's neck, but she silences the doctor's high keening _begging _wail with far more force than that, until her captor's eyes are staring blankly at the wall behind her. Quistis drops the corpse; there is the sticky feeling of blood under her toes as she slips out of the open cell door, leaving ruin in her wake and a screaming headache rattling in her skull.

_(Good.)_

There is that rustling noise behind her again as she walks, and Quistis reaches back over her shoulder. She finds only empty air, but when she touches her shoulderblade, her fingers come away smeared with red.


	13. thirteen

_thirteen_

He steals a motorcycle from outside the shopping arcade, where a riot has broken out and gunshots report every few seconds. No one seems to notice when he kicks the bike into gear and takes off with Fujin perched behind him, her arm around his waist and the GPS on her phone enabled. Whomever owned the bike _deserves_ having it stolen, anyway, leaving their keys in the ignition like that.

Seifer peels around the edge of a barfight spilling out onto the sidewalk, and the brawlers scatter like bowling pins, screaming obscenities in his wake. There is a minor explosion behind him, and the shot misses by a mile.

_Amateurs. _

He drives recklessly, like an _idiot_, weaving through standstill traffic like this is one of Rai's racing games (although by the time they all took driver's education in Garden, those games were cakewalks, and it took most of the fun out of them.) Fujin taps his sides when he needs to turn, and he makes a left on red at one point, avoiding turning them both into roadkill by centimeters, pinning the bike practically on its side as he jerks just out of range of a massive sport-utility vehicle.

He can feel Fujin's burst of laughter against his neck, and a tug on his right side.

Seifer turns, and skids to a stop just before he barrels into a construction zone, the orange-striped barricades taunting him as they impede his path. The road is a disaster, full of potholes and equipment that will only spell failure if he tries to navigate through.

"_Shit_," he snarls, but there, up ahead, not even a half a block away is a tiny alleyway that Fujin thinks will avoid most of the mess. They'll have to take their chances. There's no _time_, and no way to know if Quistis is even still alive.

(he knows, in his chest, he knows)

The alley is too small to really be safe for pedestrians, much less to barrel through on a motorcycle going sixty, but that's exactly what he does, pulling in his knees and arms and shoulders to avoid flaying himself alive against the brick that closes in on both sides.

He comes too close at one point, just enough to send the left mirror hurtling off behind them, and he feels Fujin flinch, her fingers in a deathgrip with the fabric of his coat.

There is no time for apologies, no time to slow down, no time to be careful. No time, no time.

_-no time, existence denied. _

Seifer guns it, and they leave the alley behind, rocketing out into a twisting labyrinth of faceless warehouses and factories missing windows like teeth.

For some reason, he has the copper-rotten taste of blood in his mouth.

_xx_

There is a blaring siren descending the stairs behind her as she runs down them, stumbling at the end and catching herself on the railing before she completely collapses. Her leg is on _fire_, and her skin feels like it is covered in spiderwebs, the drug slowly, slowly, _slowly _working its way out of her system. It leaves her wanting to get on hands and knees and crawl at points with the way it wraps around her, tugging her toward the ground.

_(Not good, get up, focus, _focus_.)_

The alarm means that someone has found the bloodbath she's left in the prison cell, which turned out to be one of those metal-lined bomb shelters built right in the middle of a laboratory. She has been lucky so far, coming across few other people and avoiding them just in time. That won't last, though. It's never that easy.

Right now, though, that isn't important. She'll take care of that when they arrive, coming to put her back into a cage or to launch her into space or to put a bullet in her brain.

Right now, she is bleeding; there is a long serrated tear in the back of her thigh that she's not sure how she got, and everything is starting to go a little bit to the right, melting out of reach. She had stopped long enough to tear a long strip of her shirt off, wrapping it around her thigh and knotting it with shaking fingers, but the thin fabric has already soaked through red. When she looks behind her, she can see drips of it on the stairs, breadcrumbs saying, _look, I'm right here, come and finish the job. _

There is no time to change the bandage. There isn't even really time to stand here like this, gasping for breath like a Balamb cod as she holds onto the railing.

_Cure_, she breathes, and this time, the spell makes it to the bare edges of her wound before it shatters apart. The adrenaline that has fueled her this far is ebbing away the longer she spends wandering the impossible corridors of the building, where staircases lead to dead-ends. There is no clearly marked exit sign, not here.

Glancing out a window reveals a fall of at least five stories. Jumping is out of the question, unless one of the innumerable rooms happens to contain a parachute. A rattle of the window reveals that it's locked and painted shut, anyway.

Any moment, any moment.

That is when she expects to die, because Quistis Trepe doesn't know if she can go through another battle in the state that she is in, superhuman manifestation or not.

"Come on," she whispers, pushing herself up from her half-slump in the window alcove, "now you have to walk, Quistis."

She limps forward, and then flattens herself nearly immediately against the wall as voices come from the t-junction that she has just reached. They are accompanied by the sound of running, and two men in faded fatigues, the mark of home-grown rebellion, turn the corner, guns at the ready.

_(You have no choice.)_

Quistis pushes herself out of her hiding-hole and grabs the closest one around the neck. The crack of vertebrae echoes even above the siren, but there is no time to dwell on that. She lifts the gun from his dead hand before he can drop it and brings it up firing, putting two black holes in the other soldier's chest, and then one right between his eyes.

There is a radio squawking on one of the dead men's chests, and Quistis fumbles for the power button, knocking it into silence before her position is given away.

She takes his weapon, too, checking the safety and stuffing it awkwardly in the waistband of her jeans, for lack of better options. A quick rifle of their pockets brings forth a few gil and a butterfly knife. No potions, though, not that she really expected it. Potions are expensive.

It's not the arsenal she would like, and it's certainly not Save the Queen, but she feels a little bit better.

_Now you have to escape, Quistis_.

She stumbles down the hallway, feeling like she's making more noise than a herd of Mesmerizes, and when she sees the service elevator, it is the most wonderful thing she has ever laid eyes on. The carriage opens with a pleasant _ding_, allowing her into a space big enough to fit a grand piano in, and when she presses her finger on the button for the first floor, the doors slide shut just as easily.

Maybe she should've gotten off at two. That might've been the smarter choice, although she can't really recall why. It doesn't matter. She presses her hand against the back of her leg, trying to staunch some of the blood flowing freely.

The elevator descends.

_xx_

Fujin's directions put him in the neighborhood of the right warehouse just as a SeeD team is rolling up in a gleaming black vehicle that screams, _bomb me, I'm the enemy_.

Seifer rolls the bike to a stop right alongside the SeeD car, studying the team as they pile out. He knows most of them on sight- Chesterly, Evans- but it's Rai who surprises him the most, his voice booming out from behind the small group as they stop and stare at Seifer.

"Hey, what the hell, ya' know-"

Seifer flicks them a lazy salute, keeping an eye on Evans, who's already reaching for her radio. "Xu said there was a party around here." He digs out his phone. "I was invited, before anyone tries to shoot me."

Evans snatches the cell phone out of his hand and looks at the message, signed with the authorization code of their dear commander. It's as good as a direct order, and Seifer knows they know this, because Evans eventually holds out his phone and nods. "He's clear."

"Fantastic. Now, anyone have a gun I can borrow?"

The entire team is bristling with weapons, and he would _murder _for Hyperion right now.

-_nowyouhavetorun-_

Raijin is handing him a weapon when Quistis' voice shoves its way into his brain. Seifer snatches the gun out of his friend's hand and takes off running, Fujin on his heels and Raijin just behind, and if the rest of them want to come, that's their perogative.

_I'm coming, _he thinks as hard as he can. It shouldn't work- this shouldn't be possible, not by any stretch of the imagination- but she is back in his head, and her voice is faint:

_Hurry._

xx

The elevator opens onto an empty corridor. Down the hall, though, she can hear people, many of them, screaming into phones and at each other. Her welcoming committee, all waiting for her arrival.

_(You can do this_.)

Well, if the voice in her head has any ideas...

The roiling sensation in her chest slams into her and Quistis thinks she might throw up with the force of heat rushing upward. The sensation leaves her fingers tingling and her ears ringing. One last burst of adrenaline, then, she supposes. Or something else.

_(You have one chance.)_

Distantly, she is aware that someone is shouting at her, that the voices are coming closer, and Quistis keeps moving forward, the gun held out in front of her like a shield. People are advancing, a great mass of them, all reaching for her, all wanting her blood.

The tingling intensifies, burning now, flames licking up her veins and chasing away the cold still lingering there. Her arm is on _fire_... her whole body is, it feels like.

She pulls the trigger of the gun once, twice, three times, and still the crowd does not scatter.

The corridor is expanding, melting, collapsing. She's losing too much blood already for them to take any more.

_(Three.)_

She has a glimpse of his face, his perfect face, before it disappears. Is this it, then? The last time she'll ever see him? Not even time for a goodbye. _I'm sorry, _she thinks, _I'm so sorry. _

Quistis fires again, again, and the chamber clicks empty. She throws the gun aside, pulls the second from her waistband. _Bang. _

_Bang. _

_Bang. _

_(Two_.)

And their hands are on her, grabbing her, ripping the weapon out of her fingers, but her skin is burning hot, too hot to hold onto. They are shouting at her, something about revenge, murder, all the misery she has caused. She is weary of hearing some other girl's problems blamed on her.

Quistis Trepe closes her eyes.

_(One.)_

_xx_

They are two blocks away when the warehouse explodes, and all Seifer hears is, _I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry-_


	14. fourteen

_fourteen_

Squall Leonhart's return to Balamb is heralded by Garden vehicles, blocking off the main access road into town. He slams on the brakes, and the sedan lurches sideways, shuddering to a stop. The horn is impressively loud, so Squall keeps his palm pressed against it for a good ten seconds.

One of the cadets ambles over, stern-faced as she raps a gloved hand against the closed window. She calls, "Road's shut down. Turn your car around."

Squall rolls down the window with a press of a button. "Move the trucks," he says, and all of the authority that he has cast away comes back in full, brutal force. He recognizes this SeeD- she used to be part of his security team, before Xu turned on him.

"Comm-" She stops herself before the word slips out, but just in time. "Sir, I can't let you through."

"Report."

"I can't give you that information. Sorry. You'll have to turn around." She looks apologetic in the way that only soldiers can, the expression that says, _just following orders_, _now get out of here before I shoot you._

Rinoa is playing with a lock of her hair when Squall glances over at her. She drops her hands, narrows her eyes, and like _that_, there is a shift in the air, electricity on the wind and a rumble underground. The SeeD puts her hand on her baton, dropping into a reflexive defensive crouch.

"Move the trucks," Squall repeats; the threat hangs there, looming. Distantly, there is the boom of thunder, and the earth shakes again. He can feel the vibration through the soles of his feet. "Don't make me do this, Jansen," he adds, desperately. "Please."

He can see the war in her thoughts- regulations versus old loyalties, and somewhere there is still a bit of humanity left in her that SeeD hasn't carved out. Jansen backs off.

"Let 'em pass!" she yells.

"Thank you."

"Don't get yourself killed," Jansen tells him.

The trucks move out of the way, clearing a path, and Squall hits the accelerator. Ahead, there is a blooming cloud of smoke hanging over the tiny town. How many are dead? How many more are going to die before the day is over?

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Rinoa twisting the lock of hair around her fingers again, and her expression is blank.

_xx_

-and then Seifer is aware that he might be screaming, thrashing against Rai's arm, because there is no _way_, no fucking _way_ she is dead, because that doesn't happen. He's supposed to save her, riding in there like a knight on a goddamned white _horse-_

"No, no, _no, no, no-" _He shoves Raijin's arm away, twisting it in a defensive maneuver that elicits a yelp from his friend, but it doesn't _matter_, because she is _in there, _she is_ dying. _

(she is already dead)

"Seifer!" His friends are yelling after him, because this is the single most stupid thing he has _ever done_, but all he can do is run toward that building, now, while it's just barely standing.

There is a bright blast around the edges of his vision all of a sudden, and Seifer's pace speeds up. Someone, probably Fujin, has hit him with a haste spell, and he thanks her silently as he sprints toward the warehouse, covering his head as glass and shrapnel fall from the sky. The temperature increases dramatically the closer he gets to the warehouse; when he sucks in breath, seeking out fresh oxygen, the air sears his lungs. His exhalation comes out as her name.

Seifer barrels through the skeleton of the entrance. The building groans, shuddering, threatening to collapse entirely.

"_Quistis!" _he yells, "Answer me!"

There's nothing, not right away. Not the whisper of her words in his mind, not even a faint susurrus of her heartbeat, nothing to give away her position. _She's dead_, a voice taunts him. _Dead dead dead. _

No. That's not possible. He will _not _fucking believe that.

There is a sudden scalding pain along his leg, and when he looks down, flames are creeping up his pants. He beats at them, frantically, tearing off his destroyed coat to subdue them, and when he comes up victorious, he tosses the coat away. It collides with what used to be a potted plant, and the fire devours it.

Seifer is yanking up the collar of his t-shirt over his mouth, clamping his hand across his nose to hold his mock-mask in place, when her voice stirs around the edges of his mind, faint, so, so faint.

_here-here-here-over here-_

He follows the sound to the left, where the smoke is unbearably thick. "Quistis-" He coughs, choking, and has to drop the shirt collar long enough to hock up a mouthful of gray phlegm, spitting it onto the soot-covered linoleum floor. "_Quistis_!"

-_seifer-_

There is the shrieking of metal, the horrific dying wail of architecture. Every iota of common sense in his body tells him he has to get out of here, but he won't.

Not without her.

"_QUISTIS_!" Her name rips from his lips in a roar. He can't see through the massive clouds of smoke, not enough to judge if there's anyone left alive, but there is the subtle wink of blue in response, far away down the end of the corridor, and Seifer runs to it.

_xx_

well, she always knew she was going to hell.

the fire wraps around her, a cocoon, keeping her trapped

in here, alone, alone, with the skeletons of what used to be

people.

someone is yelling her name.

(it isn't real, quistis, it isn't real)

and then there are hands on her, tugging her up

out of the frozen, fiery embrace, picking her

up from the ground like she weighs nothing.

_quistis, quistis, quistis_

there is the groaning of fatiguing metal, and

she thinks they are flying.

_xx_

She is _alive. _

Curled up fetal at the heart of a nest of bones and skulls, people flayed free of their skin. What has she _done_?

He grabs her arm, pulling her to her feet, and Quistis hangs loosely from his grip, unable or unwilling to walk. To run. To _escape_.

Somewhere alarmingly close by, there is another blast, part of the building collapsing under its own weight. Seifer gathers her up into his arms, wheeling around back down the corridor. His lungs burn with the extra weight in his arms, and the journey of fifty feet takes an eternity.

The one clear exit they had is gone, the door frame splintered apart into a six foot wall of flame. Seifer spins wildly, looking for another way out, anything, a window, a secret tunnel- _something. _

Shit. Shit, shit, _shit. _

Quistis stirs, coughing into his shirt.

"Is there another exit?" he demands, his words raspy-hoarse from the sheer amount of smoke he's managed to inhale. Her eyes roll up at him, slivers of blue. She is terrifyingly pale in the firelight. He shakes her more forcefully than he intended, his entire body on edge with the force of the haste spell. "Quistis- did you see _another way out_?"

A chunk of burning ceiling drops and he reels back, narrowly avoiding the whole mess. They are trapped, and he would kill for a Protect or a Shell or _something_.

_closeyoureyes. _

"Hey! _Quistis_!"

Her hand spiders up his chest, fisting into his shirt.

_closeyoureyes. _

"God, wake _up_, you have to answer me-"

His lungs feel like they are collapsing. The smoke is thick, impossible to see through- they're screwed, utterly, completely screwed. This isn't how he pictured the end.

(It should be in a battlefield, with Hyperion in his hand, glory hanging around him like a well-earned cloak. It should be with him wrinkled and old, with Quistis by his side.)

_close_

_your_

_eyes_

When it comes, the pain is unrelenting, burning straight down to his cells. Is this dying?

This is the end of everything.

This is the rush of static, and this is the blistering silence.

This is where his story ends.

He doesn't understand.

_xx_

when he opens his eyes, there is only a blinding white light, unbearably hard to look at.

somewhere overhead, a seagull cries out, and he thinks maybe he smells the salt of the ocean.

it is too much to comprehend, though, so he surrenders, giving himself back into the cool embrace of oblivion.

it's better there.


	15. fifteen

_fifteen_

The sea lifts her, bobbing her gently onto the shore. Her fingers splay in wet mire, and she digs them in, holding fast before the swells can take her again. Quistis coughs, wetly, and turns her head to the right. Something comes out of her mouth. She sees the faint tinges of red. It is washed away.

She coughs again, and pulls herself forward. Wet sand gives way to dry. She rolls onto her back, and thinks she might be dead. Every part of her hurts, seared right down to her bones.

Quistis rolls her head. There is the flash of something bobbing in the ocean, a toy lost by a child—no, not a toy. A body. A man.

_No. _

When she stands, she stumbles, falling forward. Her hands smack against sea foam; Quistis pushes her feet against the muck, propelling herself forward into the sea. The water is freezing. She wades out to her waist, and then cannot stand anymore, letting a swell pick her up and drag her back out. The weightlessness is a balm. The salt stings a thousand open wounds. She lifts one arm, then the other.

_Swim_, she orders herself.

Seifer's face is pale, his lips are blue. She fists her fingers into his shirt and says his name, screaming above the crash of the ocean.

She cannot hear his heartbeat.

_Seifer._

A wave pushes them out to the shore. It tries to drag them back. She resists.

She drags his corpse up onto the beach, inch by laborious inch.

-_no, no no no_

He is not dead.

He is not dead.

The sand gives way beneath her feet; she trips, the sand hard under her. The sea still laps at his feet, threatening to pull him back in. She grabs his wrist and pulls with one last burst of strength.

His eyes are closed. His pulse is nothing, but her fingers are numb. When she holds her hand, shaking, over his mouth, she feels no exhalation of breath.

This isn't happening.

Her arms are limp; she places her palms against his chest anyway, pushing down hard in a million-times-practiced motion.

She pinches his nose and tilts his head back and presses her lips to his and breathes into his mouth.

One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten.

_Exhale._

Thunder crashes in the distance.

_xx_

Balamb is in ruins and it is beginning to rain. Squall runs out of space to drive less than two blocks in; he throws the car into park and looks at Rinoa.

She meets his gaze levelly, and her eyes are huge and dark and more pupil than iris. She is trembling with the force of magic, and she is unstoppable.

Squall grabs Lionheart from the backseat and they escape the car into the fray. The streets are a madhouse, people running in a thousand different directions without a single idea of what's going on.

Someone comes at him with a wild swing. Squall catches the glint of something in the man's hand. Lionheart goes through the stranger's chest and two feet of Trabian steel stick out the other side. Squall kicks the corpse hard; his gunblade pulls free of flesh and bone and organs with a wet smacking sound, metal streaked with blood. There is no time to clean it before there is another assault, a soldier in Galbadian fatigues, and her forearm is neatly separated from her elbow, the gun in her hand skittering away with the limb.

At his back, Rinoa whispers a spell. He feels the weight of a shield settle onto his skin. He hears the rustle of feathers.

He is not surprised.

They descend upon the chaos, a knight and an avenging angel. It does not take long before he loses count of the bodies he's gutted.

There is someone shouting his name. Squall looks up, quickly, and Zell is there, screaming for him to look _out_; he hits the deck, dragging Rinoa down with him. A fira spell explodes near his face, and Squall smells the scorched-earth scent it leaves in its wake. He clamps his hand around Rinoa's wrist, hauling her to her feet, and _runs_, charging toward Zell, toward the Balamb Hotel, where sniper fire issues from every available window. A hail of bullets chases them through the door.

Rinoa cries out. The door slams shut behind them.

"What?" he says frantically, and he expects to see her organs on the floor. "What?"

Red soaks down her arm. "I'm fine," she tells him, _just a scratch, I'm fine._ He reaches down and tears off a strip of his shirt, the white fabric giving way easily under his grip. Squall knots the makeshift bandage tightly around her bicep. A blossom of blood appears almost as soon as he is done.

It will have to do.

"Sitrep," he demands. SeeDs are forming a barricade, shoving furniture back against the entrance to the hotel. Zell is at his side immediately.

"Galbadia's taken almost everything. We're pretty much it—we've gotten as many civilians out as we can, but…"

He thinks to the barricade of SeeDs at the edge of town—they're not keeping anyone out, they're keeping Galbadia _in_, away from Garden.

"I need a GF," he says, turning to Zell. His friend nods, ripping off his glove and pressing his fingers to Squall's temple.

There is the rushing fire of Ifrit downloading into his brain and Squall's entire world goes red for a second—it has been so _long_ since he has done this, it has not been long at all, and Ifrit comes home like an old friend.

_xx_

Her fingers spider across his chest, sliding frigid over his skin, along the sloping planes of muscle.

-_no_

_Yes, _Ultimecia's voice whispers, _yes-yes-yes. _

Her thin frozen fingers come to rest above his heart.

Please, god, no—

But he cannot fight her.

The magic slams into his chest, coiling around his heart and _squeezing_.

Seifer's entire body jerks up, seizing with the spell. His spine lands hard against soft ground. He thinks he cries out. He doesn't know anymore.

The pain ebbs. The blackness returns. He relaxes, and thinks it might be sand under his arms.

The spell hits him again.

His eyes snap open, and he sees nothing but white exploding across his vision.

His heart feels like it's going to explode out of his chest. It hurts—it _hurts_, so badly. His hand comes up, weakly, and wraps around the cold fingers, wrenching them away.

Seifer curls onto his side, one hand clamped over the entry wound, and retches up something, ash and blood and salt water, choking on it as he struggles to _breathe, dammit, breathe—_

-seifer.

There is the report of gunfire from a hundred different places. Seifer makes it to his knees.

A witch's hands are on him, helping him to stand. _Let go don't touch me let go—_

"Seifer."

His name.

He is weak, new-born, unable to rise on his own power. She drapes his arm around her neck and slips hers around his ribs. Seifer sags heavily, betrayed by his own skeleton.

Rain beats against his back, a million tiny bits of shrapnel.

_Come on, come on, we have to get out of here, _and he thinks it's Quistis' voice issuing from the witch's mouth.

He turns his head, and catches a glimpse of her profile, one he knows better than his own.

There is no time for questions, and he doesn't think he can make the words for any, regardless. Seifer puts one foot in front of the other, stumbling in the shifting sand. Quistis catches him at one point. His heartbeat is erratic, a war-drum in his ears.

They move, inch by inch, toward the burning ruin of Balamb.

_xx_

She feels the magic nearby, roaring from the sea, and she wants it, she _wants_ it.

It is easier alone, to push her way through the space between, and when Rinoa comes out in Balamb's streets, chaotic with gunfire and spell blasts and the sick stench of blood, she is still a whole person.

Almost, anyway.

Rain soaks her through. She shivers, and breaks into a run.

The blue-beat of magic pulses just ahead, an ancient draw point that beckons the sorceress home.


End file.
